23 February 2015 9:38 AM

I publish the following with the permission of the author, whose identity is known to me but which I will not reveal.

‘My father was in the RAF during the war, as a flight sergeant. I had never heard him talk about that time. When he was staying with me one I suggested we might go to the RAF museum in Hendon, thinking he would be interested in it. We did go, but he seemed very quiet and subdued during our visit. On the way home he told me that he didn’t like to remember his time in the RAF, because so often he had been preparing planes for men to fly off in, men he knew well and liked, who were not going to come back.

‘He also said that they were well aware of what the bombing was doing to the German people and their cities and this too preyed on his mind. Our family comes from Plymouth, which suffered badly from bombing in the war, but they knew the raids on Hamburg and Dresden were far worse. My father said that he and his fellow-servicemen did what they were ordered to do, but had no interest at all in revenge and thought the raids contributed little to the war effort.’

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19 February 2015 1:01 PM

An aspect of the Bombing War that seldom gets much attention is the terrible squandering of young lives – British lives. I’m told from time to time that Arthur Harris was popular with his crews, and that their nickname for him of ‘Butch’ (short for ‘Butcher’) was affectionate.

Maybe so. I am not sure how one can know the whole truth of this, thanks to the 44% casualty rate which meant that so many of them were dead long before they could make a considered assessment of their commander.

In round numbers that means that, of 120,000 Bomber command aircrew, 55,573 were killed, (this includes more than 10,000 Canadians) . Only one in ten of those flying at the start of the war survived to the end. Of every 100, 45 were killed, six seriously wounded , 8 were captured and so only 41 escaped unhurt.

This carnage is comparable only with that of the First World War’s worst battles.

As Siegfried Sassoon wrote in a different context

“ ‘Good morning; good morning!’ the General said

When we met him last week on our way to the line.

Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ‘em dead

And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.

‘He’s a cheery old card’ grunted Harry to Jack,

As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack

….

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.”

Though I am repeatedly (and stupidly) accused of attacking the fliers when I attack the British state policy of bombing civilians (over which serving airmen had no control at all, and about which I think they were told little) , I am in fact lost in admiration for the aircrews, and cannot imagine how they did what they did. I’ll come to that in a moment.

Arthur Harris wasn’t so admiring. Richard Overy writes on p.353 that Harris thought only a quarter of his crews were effective bombers, the rest merely there to give the Germans something to shoot at.

I was thinking about this anyway, because of the Dresden anniversary. But I thought about it even more after reading Helen Dunmore’s recent short novel ‘The Greatcoat’, a sort of ghost story featuring an airbase and a pilot, whose plot I will not here give away. Helen Dunmore wrote a superb novel about starvation and war in Leningrad (‘The Siege’), and she has a particular skill in describing cold, the way it surrounds us, and the ways in which we seek to escape it, which I (who love the cold ) find particularly moving.

But this book has another feature, which I think I can give away without spoiling it. It mentions a cracked, yellow little song (as George Orwell might have put it) , which in the book is sung by some airmen.

It runs (to the tune of Haydn’s ‘Austria’, used for that great hymn ‘Glorious things of Thee are Spoken’ (or ‘Deutschland Ueber Alles’ if you prefer):

‘I don’t want to go to Chopland

I won’t want to go at all

I don’t want to go to Chopland

Where our chances are f***-all’

And it sends a chill right through me because I can almost hear it being sung in a low, miserable flat tone in Nissen hut in a sea of mud one foggy night, by a man (or maybe a couple of men) and I can hear the angry Flight Sergeant yelling ‘Will you shut up! If I hear you singing that ****ing **** again, you’ll be on a charge!’ And then a long sullen silence. Best not talked about, eh? But who can doubt that something of the sort happened? How would any of us have coped with the more or less 50% chance of a screaming, fiery death some night very soon, while living in reasonable comfort on an air base by day?

If the book is right (and purists criticise some of Ms Dunmore’s technical facts, so who knows?) the word ‘chop’ had a very special significance in the language of RAF crews. It was the way in which the unsayable – that most of them were going to die horribly - could be said. Doomed crews, who had run out of luck, before their 25 or 30 missions were up, would (it is claimed) *look* doomed . They would have ‘the chop look’. And if they did, they wouldn’t come back.

I don’t know where she got this from. It’s obviously the sort of superstition that flourishes on the edge of the pit of death. I’d be interested if anyone had read anything substantial on morale among the Lancaster crews. I suspect that, like so much else to do with this episode, it’s something those involved weren’t then and aren’t now that keen to talk about.

Apparently 3% of flying officers (3% of those who survived) were removed from flying status before completing 25 operations. Some, it’s very hard to find out how many, were categorised with the harsh words ‘Lack of Moral Fibre’, humiliated in various ways, stripped of rank and sent off in disgrace to do menial tasks elsewhere.

I would guess that most flyers put up with it rather than look weak in front of their fellow airmen. That’s generally what keeps soldiers form running away in battle, the fear of letting their mates down.

But it is very hard to imagine how they felt, physically, as they set off on each flight towards the storm of steel that waited them. Hard, also, to imagine how they lived by day in the English countryside, went to the pub, courted girls, knowing that so many of their comrades had already made the journey into the dark and not come back. And having, in many cases, seen aircraft from their own squadron shot down close to them, so needed no imagination to know what fate awaited them.

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14 February 2015 1:10 PM

The Bombing Files – a compilation on the question of bombing by the RAF during the Second World War.

I thought I would assemble in one place my recent articles and book reviews on this difficult and complicated subject. I do very strongly urge those interested to read the whole thing, as it may save them from accusing me of holding views I don’t hold, or of having ‘never addressed’ various topics.

I begin with a review of Richard Overy’s recent book ‘The Bombing War’, because it contains so many useful facts:

Richard Overy’s ‘The Bombing War' is now available in a reasonably portable Penguin paperback (though I wish it was easier to navigate the footnotes).

My own position described and explained

Longstanding readers will recall my accounts of Anthony Grayling’s devastating account of the British bombing of Germany ‘Among the Dead Cities’, and of Sir Max Hastings’s excellent ‘Bomber Command’ . Others will, I hope, recall my championing, on Radio 4 and elsewhere, of Bishop George Bell (who lost two brothers in the Great War) and Major Richard Stokes MC MP (a highly-decorated Great War artillery officer) , non-pacifist objectors to the deliberate bombing of German civilians. Also some may remember a discussion of the criticisms of the effectiveness of the bombing campaign levelled by Sir Henry Tizard, as described in an interesting series of lectures by C.P.Snow.

I get into no end of trouble for my position on this. I am told that I am unpatriotic, even now, for discussing it or for being distressed by the extreme and horrible cruelties inflicted by our bombs on innocent women and children, who could not conceivably be held responsible for Hitler’s crimes. On the contrary, I believe it is the duty of a proper patriot to criticize his country where he believes it to have done wrong.

What I do not think and have not said

I am told I am defaming the memory of the bomber crews. I have never done so, and never will. They had little idea of what they were doing, died terrible deaths in terrible numbers thanks to the ruthless squandering of life by their commanders, and showed immense personal courage. It is those who, knowing what was being done, ordered them into battle that I blame.

I am told that I am equating our bombing of Germany with the German mass murder of the Jews, when I would not dream of making such a comparison, never have done so and never will. I am told that I am excusing the mass murder of the Jews, when nothing could ever excuse it and I should certainly never attempt to do so. Is it still necessary to say that two wrongs do not make a right, and that one horribly wrong thing may be worse than another horribly wrong thing, and yet they may both still be horribly wrong, examined by themselves as actions?

I am told that I wasn’t there. This is true, but Bell, Stokes and Tizard were there, and protested, much as I do and for the same reasons, moral in two cases, practical in one. I hope I should have had their courage. I think I can say that I am sometimes prepared to espouse unpopular causes.

Our survival was not at stake

I am told that the bombing was necessary because our survival was at stake. It quite simply wasn’t – Hitler had been irreversibly defeated at Stalingrad, and the USA were in the war, long before the mass bombing got under way.

Civilian deaths were intended, not a side-effect

I am also told that it was not our policy to kill civilians, and that they died accidentally as a result of attacks on military targets. This is flatly untrue, as I shall shortly show.

I am also told that the bombing was justified by its military effect upon Germany, and that it advanced Germany’s defeat. This is, to put it mildly, highly questionable.

In the following review of Professor Overy’s book, I shall adduce evidence which seems to me to devastate the case of those who continue to claim that the deliberate bombing of German civilians in their homes was militarily or morally justified. I would urge any who wish to attack this view to obtain and read the book before doing so. It is a formidable work of research and marshalled scholarship, dispassionate and carefully referenced:

The book ranges over much more than the British bombing of Germany. Did you know, for instance, that the Italian Air Force once bombed Tel Aviv? Details of German bombing of the USSR, and accurate accounts of the German bombing of Warsaw and Rotterdam in 1939 and 1940, are well worth reading, not least because of the large myths which have grown up around both of these events, quite horrible enough unadorned. The descriptions of the very heavy Allied bombing of German-occupied countries, and the strains this caused to their powerless populations, are particularly painful.

But these are things I must urge the reader of Professor Overy’s book to examine for himself or herself.

It is the British Empire’s bombing of Germany, and to some extent the parallel American bombing of Germany, which I wish to examine on the grounds of both military effectiveness and morality.

It is my view that the facts form a great cloud of witness against this form of warfare, which we must hope is never again adopted by any civilized nation, or indeed by any nation. I used to hold another view. Let us see if I, helped by Richard Overy, can persuade you.

They started it! Did they? This may surprise you

On page 243 we learn that the deliberate bombing of cities in World War Two was not a retaliation against Hunnish barbarism, but definitely begun by the RAF, on 11th May 1940, long before the Blitz, with a raid on what was then known as Muenchen Gladbach (it is now, for tedious reasons, known as Moenchengladbach) in western Germany. This was not, as some claim, a response to Germany’s bombing of Rotterdam, because Rotterdam was not bombed till 14th May.

The main reason for the attack seems to have been that Winston Churchill, who favoured bombing in general and had always supported the idea of a separate Air Force, had taken over from Neville Chamberlain, who opposed the bombing of cities on principle. The town was defined as a military-economic target and the attack was supposed to be in response to Germany’s invasion of the Low Countries, just begun.

The extent of the damage was slight. As discussed here, and particularly dealt with by Max Hastings, the RAF missed most of its targets hopelessly badly, and its inadequate bombing planes, mostly poorly designed and using outdated tactics, were blasted from the sky by the Luftwaffe in terrible numbers during the early part of combat.

Churchill’s mandate for bombing

On page 254, the language of British leaders began to take on a rather fearsome tone. Winston Churchill speculates in a letter (8th July 1940) to his friend and Aircraft Production Minister Lord (Max) Beaverbrook that an ‘absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland’ would help to bring Hitler down. Arthur Harris kept a copy of this letter and told Andrew Boyle in 1979 ‘That was the RAF mandate’.

Human beings are the stated target

The killing of workers was an explicit policy. In June 1941 (p.257) we find an Air Ministry draft directive saying that ‘Continuous and relentless bombing of these workers and their utility services, over a period of time, will inevitably lower their morale, kill a number of them and thus appreciably reduce their industrial output.’

In April of the same year (p.258) a policy review urged attacks on ‘working-class’ areas. In November that year (also p.258) a memorandum almost certainly written by Harris was asking if the time had not come to strike ‘against the people themselves’. In May (p.259), the Director of Air Intelligence welcomed an attack on the ‘the livelihood, the homes, the cooking heating, lighting and family life of…the working class’ (they were the least mobile and most vulnerable to such an attack).

In November 1941, Sir Richard Peirse, then Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, told ‘the Thirty Club’ that his planes had nearly a year been attacking ‘the people themselves’, intentionally.(p.259)

‘No scruples’ - though we preferred the world to think otherwise

‘I mention this because for a long time the Government for excellent reasons has preferred the world to think that we still held some scruples and attacked only what the humanitarians are pleased to call Military Targets. …I can assure you, gentlemen, that we tolerate no scruples.’

On the same page it is shown that senior officials knew of the policy but preferred the truth of it not to be widely known in case ‘false and misleading deductions’ were made.

A profoundly disturbing Air Staff memorandum (p.265) explicitly desires that towns should be made ‘physically uninhabitable’ and the people in them must be ‘conscious of constant personal danger’. The aim was to produce ‘destruction’ and ‘the fear of death’.

‘Kill a lot of Boche’

Harris himself wrote in April 1942 (p.287)’We have got to kill a lot of Boche before we win this war’. Harris, paradoxically to his credit, never lied to himself or anyone else about what he was doing. He never shied away from his purpose of killing Germans and wanted it acknowledged publicly. Perhaps he suspected that Churchill and others would seek to disavow the policy later.

Lord Cherwell’s ‘de-housing’ Minute

On p.288 you will find details of Lord Cherwell’s famous minute calling for the de-housing of a third of Germany’s population (an aim based on totally wrong and exaggerated ideas of the power of bombing, as it turned out). ‘Investigation seems to show that having one’s house demolished is most damaging to morale’, it said, airily. You might say. You might also say that it would be hard to destroy that many houses intentionally without, equally intentionally, destroying many of their occupants.

There is plenty more of this in Professor Overy’s account. I’ll turn later to the effectiveness, or otherwise, of the bombing.

I should point out here that careful readers of the book will find that a neglected theme of this controversy is the constant and rather nervous desire of the RAF, and of Bomber Command, to justify their actual existence, and to advance the claims of air power as an independent force, rather than (as both Army and the Navy have always wanted and still want) as an adjunct to the Army and Navy, aiding them in their purposes. The bombing of cities as independent targets, unconnected with any ground operations, is a direct outgrowth of this highly questionable view of military science.

Stalin liked bombing

As one might expect, a significant part of the drive for the killing of Germans did come from Josef Stalin, our ‘noble’ ally against Hitler, and (like Hitler) a man to whom the killing of innocent people was never a problem. Though it seems (p.394) that Stalin was not to blame for the attacks on Dresden.

Let us proceed to pages 296 and 297, where Churchill has gone to visit Stalin, who is very annoyed that the British and Americans have abandoned a plan for an invasion of Western Europe originally set for 1942, and is more or less insulting. Churchill says there will be bombing instead, lots of it.

‘Stalin took over the argument himself and said that homes as well as factories must be destroyed.’

Soon afterwards, Churchill (p.297) was pressed by Harris for a commitment to a bombing offensive. Churchill responded that he was committed to bombing, partly because it would look bad to stop such a major part of Britain’s war effort, but he did not expect it to have decisive results in 1943 or bring the war to an end. It was, Churchill said ‘better than doing nothing’.

But better for whom? This is basically war by public relations, with actions judged by their political and morale effect, rather than their military result. Can one kill innocents for the sake of appearances? It seems a moral stretch to me.

Leo Amery, a War Cabinet member, was not taken with Harris’s urgings for a full-scale bombing attack (p.297). Quoting a scientist at the Air Warfare branch who said the RAF could not hit enough German industry to do decisive damage, Amery wrote: ‘I am aware that this view of night bombing is shared by a very large number of thoughtful people’.

One answer to the claim that the bomber offensive forced Germany to divert resources from the Russian front is that a more effective bomber offensive against military targets would have done the same. Another is that the bombing campaign also forced Britain to divert scarce and costly resources – trained men, metals, explosive, engine manufacturing capacity, from the build-up of its D-Day army, and of course from the Battle of the Atlantic, the U-boat war which Churchill later confessed was the only part of the conflict that had truly worried him.

Was it a sensible use of resources?

On pp 298-299 we find that in 1942 the RAF dropped 37,192 tons of bombs on Germany. Most missed their targets completely. The raids cost 2,716 bombers lost on missions or in accidents. During 1942, the RAF also killed 4,900 Germans, two for each bomber lost (Bomber Command itself lost 14,000 dead from September 1939 to September 1942).

It was not central to victory

On p.303 Overy notes that the Casablanca Conference of January 1943, at which the USA and Britain hammered out their European strategy, did not really view the bomber offensive as central to victory. He writes ‘Bombing survived as an option not because it was central to the strategic outlook of the western allies, but because it was secondary’.

On p.310 we learn that the RAF’s Charles Portal was predicting that his force could kill 900,000 Germans in 18 months, seriously injure 1,000,000, destroy six million homes and ‘de-house’ 25 million people (so much for deaths being unintended collateral damage). Overy also points out that American fliers were puzzled as to what the RAF’s actual strategic aim was in pursuing this policy.

It was too late to ‘save us from invasion’

On p.322, we learn that Arthur Harris admitted that his bomber offensive only started seriously in March 1943. This is important because so many people like to claim that the bombing ‘saved Britain from invasion’ or ‘won the war’ or was ‘the only way we could strike back’.

Nor did it ‘win the war’

Yet the invasion had been cancelled in September 1940. Russia and the USA had joined the war in 1941(making German eventual defeat inevitable) but for nearly three years after Dunkirk, this ‘sole weapon’ had barely begun to be used.

What is more, the decisive battle of Stalingrad, after which the victory of the USSR over Germany was pretty much assured, had ended with a Soviet victory in February 1943, Von Paulus and his armies had been marched off to prison camps before Harris’s offensive even got under way.

Claims are often made that the firestorm in Hamburg, if replicated, could have destroyed German morale. Hitler’s favourite, Albert Speer is said to have held this opinion. The damage was indeed appalling. But in fact (pp.337-338) Hamburg recovered as a functioning city and port with remarkable speed.

On pp 343 there are some striking figures about RAF losses 4,026 aircraft lost, 2,823 of them in combat (the constant attrition of experienced crews meant rapid training and many more flying accidents than would have befallen well-trained crews) .

As Overy writes ‘Although both forces [British and American] advertised their success in diverting ever-increasing numbers of German fighters to the defence of the Reich, this was in some sense a Pyrrhic victory, since the bomber forces were now subject to escalating and possibly insupportable levels of loss and damage’.

Harris ludicrously overestimated the economic damage he was doing

Harris (p.344) was livid when researchers said his attacks had only reduced German economic potential by 9% in 1943. He was sure he had done far more damage. But after the war 9% turned out to be an over-estimate.

Again, the human cost of the war to our own side was appalling. During 1943, Bomber Command lost 15,678 killed or captured, and the US 8th Air Force lost 9,497.

The idea that the bombing might create some sort of revolution against Hitler was often touted. But expert analyses pointed out that Nazi Germany offered no avenue for protest, and the Allied insistence on unconditional surrender (an unexamined policy which may well have prolonged the war for a year or more) rather ruled out a more compliant government coming to office and suing for peace.

Should we have done what the Americans did?

This is not the place for a long debate on the American daylight bombing, under increasingly heavy and effective long-range fighter escort – though there is no doubt that experience shows that, had the allies made a determined attack on German oil production and refinery capacity, they would have done far more damage to the war effort than by any other means. Overy concedes that many of the American raids were in effect area bombing since they could not achieve the accuracy for pinpoint bombing,

He contrasts the Americans’ decision to take the war to the Luftwaffe itself (which in the end destroyed German air power) with the RAF’s persistence, to the end, in bombing urban targets.

In April 1944 (p.368) Overy details a costly and ineffective RAF raids against Berlin (too far away, too spread-out and too well-defended to allow concentrated attack easily) , and Nuremberg. Even Harris conceded that German night defences were so effective that they might create conditions in which loss rates ‘could not in the end be sustained’.

On p.381 there is an interesting discussion of possible retaliatory gas attacks, and of how they were contemplated by Churchill .

But they were not used. They would only have been used, I am sure, in retaliation against such attacks by Germany. But by then there would have been few scruples. In a very telling paragraph, Overy writes (p.382)

Why we didn’t use gas

'The RAF staff thought that incendiary and high-explosive raids were more strategically efficient [than gas or germ warfare], in that they destroyed property and equipment and not just people, but in any of these cases – blown apart, burnt alive or asphyxiated - *deliberate damage to civilian populations was now taken for granted*(my emphasis). This paved the way for the possibility of using atomic weapons on German targets in 1945 if the war had dragged on late into the year.’

Who called area bombing ‘Acts of terror and wanton destruction’?

Overy recounts how on 28th March 1945 (p.396) Churchill referred to area bombing in a memo as ‘mere acts of terror and wanton destruction’, urging that attacks turn instead to oil and transport. Harris paid no mind, and horrible things were done to several German cities in the last weeks of war.

The two major bombing powers, the USA and Britain, both conducted surveys of the effects of bombing after the war. These are described on pp 398-409. Captured Germans tended to agree that bombing of transport links and oil facilities had been crucial, bombing of cities comparatively unimportant in hampering the Nazi war effort (p.400). It is hard to see why they should have dissembled about this.

The American survey itself (p.401) said that city attacks cost only about 2.7% of German economic potential. The whole combined offensive cost a total of 17% of German economic potential by 1944, mostly due to US bombing of selected targets. (p.401). the British report largely concurred, except that it was in some way even more modest in its claims for area bombing’s effects, especially in the key year of 1844. (pp 401-402). Transport and oil remained the most important targets whoever was looking at it.

As Overy writes (p.402) : Given the uniformity of opinion on both the German and Allied sides, the one based on experience, the other on extensive research, it is surprising that the effects of bombing have occasioned so much debate ever since. The proximate causes – defeating the German Air Force and emasculating oil supply and transport - are unlikely to be undermined by further research’.

He quotes a senior RAF officer Norman Bottomley (Portal’s former deputy during the war) as saying the effect of area bombing was ‘great but never critical’.

Of course it had an impact (pp 404-405). Industrial workers died, many hours of work were lost, and most crucially huge numbers of fighter aircraft were diverted from Italy and Russia. Overy writes: ‘This situation left German armies denuded of air protection at a critical juncture’ (p.407). Though I repeat here that attacks on actual targets , as opposed to night-raids on crowded cities, would have achieved the same effect, and that the attacks were themselves a diversion of Allied strength from other fronts and aspects of the war which might have been more urgent and more productive of victory) .

But he also quotes J.K.Galbraith as saying the man-hours, aircraft and bombs ‘had cost the American economy far more in output than they had cost Germany’. This again suggests that the same resources, used elsewhere, might have achieved just as much if not more effect on Germany, without the severe moral problems of bombing cities.

Overy is not much concerned with the moral aspect of the controversy. He ends his chapter on the offensive with a sort of shrug. Governments liked bombing because it squandered fewer lives than ground offensives, because they believed it was good for propaganda and morale, because it made maximum use of new technology.

To some extent the continued popularity of bombing was then, and is now, an effect of universal suffrage democracy, whose wars, as we know, are crueller than those of Kings. To question it (as I well know) leads swiftly to a questioning of the whole myth of the war, and an unwelcome examination of how we came to be waging a war in Europe against one of the greatest land powers in human history, yet had no army in Europe with which to fight it.

The day has not yet come when this conundrum can be calmly discussed in this country, even though the whole episode began 75 years ago, and finished 69 years ago.

***

Next, I’ll turn to another historical, rather than polemic, examination of the conflict, Sir Max Hastings’s ‘Bomber Command’

I’ve never been a great admirer of Sir Max as a journalist or editor (though I respect all war correspondents who venture directly an deliberately into combat zones). I think he has often been too ready, as a writer and an editor, to accept conventional wisdom – though of late he’s also been very brave in admitting that he has in the past been mistaken.

But his military histories are simply unequalled. He has found an extraordinarily clear and authoritative voice. He has done superb research. And his great respect for courage does not blind him to folly or wrongdoing by the courageous.

‘Bomber Command’ is in many ways a more effective polemic against Arthur Harris’s campaign than A.C. Grayling’s ‘Among the Dead Cities’. This is because it is not written as a polemic, but as an engaged and intelligent history of this episode. It is very well written (as Hemingway used to say ‘It reads easy, because it was writ hard’) and no reader here would be disappointed by it.

The claims of the Harris camp, for the military value of area bombing, are thoroughly debunked. The terrible losses of brave aircrew are heartbreakingly described. One officer’s words, those of Flight Lieutenant Denis Hornsey of 76 Squadron, deserve to be read and remembered by all thoughtful people. He wrote in 1943:’If you live on the brink of death yourself, it is as if those who have gone have merely caught an earlier train to the same destination, and whatever that destination is, you will be sharing it soon, since you will almost certainly be catching the next one’. I won’t tell you what happened to Denis Hornsey in the end. You’ll have to read the book.

They knew, you see, that they were almost certain to die, and not just die, but die horribly in the dark and the cold, and only a few hours from the comfort of homes which in many cases they had left that morning and to which they would never return.

Harris’s own obdurate resistance to more effective types of bombing is recorded (a concentrated campaign against German fuel installations might actually have shortened the war in Europe). Harris’s supporters always claim he shortened the war, but he didn’t, not least because he always objected to the use of ‘his’ bombers for such action as the raids on the synthetic fuel plants.

Sir Max also deserves much credit for the chapter in which he describes the indefensible destruction of the city of Darmstadt on 11th September 1944 (it was not, in any significant way a military target) and what it involved for those living there.

As I know well, and as I have had confirmed in many exchanges with readers in the past few weeks, there is a dogged, almost furious resistance in this country to recognising what we actually did in Germany. I think this is because many people fear and suspect that it was wrong, and prefer their comforting illusions. So they will not open the door that leads to truth. Sir Max’s book is a door that leads to truth. Try this small sample: ‘the first terrible discoveries were made: cellars crammed with suffocated bodies – worse still, with amorphous heaps of melted and charred humanity. There were whole families whose remains could be removed in a laundry basket. Some bodies had shrunk to a quarter of life-size. …There were blue corpses and purple corpses, black heaps of flesh and protruding bones. Kramer saw a man carrying a sack containing the heads of his entire family…’

Which leads me to Anthony Grayling’s ‘Among the Dead Cities, which is highly polemical, but also (in my view) overpoweringly forensic (as you can see, I wrote this some time ago):

‘Last weekend was the 65th anniversary of the RAF and USAAF bombing of Dresden. I was impressed to see that residents of that lovely city formed a human chain to prevent a demonstration by neo-Nazis, trying to equate the bombing with the Holocaust. Appalling as the bombing was, it was an act of war taken against an aggressor nation, not the same as the deliberate, cold-blooded industrial slaughter of Europe's Jews, a unique crime (which I hope will remain unique and is often falsely compared with lesser horrors by irresponsible propagandists of many kinds).

The citizens of modern Dresden, which has now at least partly recovered from the destruction, and also from nearly 50 years of Communist vandalism and stupidity, are a credit to the German Federal Republic, which has made immense efforts to build a free, law-governed society out of the ruins of Hitler's Reich, and doesn't get enough credit for its success. No, it's not a perfect society (its attitude to home schooling is insupportable, for instance). But it is a very creditable one. Perhaps now we can see (in Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance) how badly such attempts to build freedom out of the rubble of tyranny can fail or falter, we should pay more attention to the German success.

Apart from anything else, anyone who seeks to excuse or minimize or diminish the Holocaust may have the effect of making a repeat of it more likely, however unintentionally. That is why the 'revisionist' arguments of some German historians, who seek to equate Holocaust and bombing, ought to be resisted.

Even so, I think we have to admit that the bombing of civilian targets by the RAF during World War Two was wrong. We can say this without in any way impugning the undoubted courage of the young men who flew in the bombing missions - and who suffered appalling casualties while doing so. But their commanders, and the politicians who knew full well what was going on, cannot be let off.

I have just read A. C. Grayling's powerful book ‘Among the Dead Cities’ (you will have to read it yourself to find out where this startling and disturbing phrase comes from). I think its case against the bombing of German civilians is unanswerable. He deals with all the standard arguments of those who justify it, pointing out that all of these would be a better argument for what the RAF largely didn't do - that is, accurate bombing of industrial, economic and military targets. One of the few missions where careful targeting was involved was the rightly famous 'Dambusters' raid, though that did inevitably cause some severe civilian casualties, many of them slave workers from defeated allied nations. Another was the bombing of the missile factory at Peenemunde. Such bombing, which was also tackled by the USAAF, also at great cost in young lives, did in fact have a much greater effect on the German ability to wage war than the bombing of civilians. The Americans, by the way, did bomb civilians in Japan, another dubious episode.

Many other issues flow from this, including the validity of the 'finest hour' and 'glorious struggle' views of the Second World War, which seem to me (who once believed them entirely) to grow more threadbare by the year. And I know that many people would simply rather not think about the matter for this very reason. The market for accounts of the Hamburg firestorm is pretty limited in Britain. That's a pity. We need to know what was done in our name, and in my view to be horrified by it, so that we can be sure we are not again reduced to this barbaric and - as it happens - ineffectual form of warfare.

It is my suspicion that the moral shrivelling of Britain since 1945, the increased violence and delinquency, the readiness to accept the abortion massacre, the general coarsening of culture and the growth of callousness have at least something to do with our willingness to shrug off - or even defend - Arthur Harris's deliberate 'de-housing' of German civilians. The British people in 1939, told of what would be done in their name within six years, would have been incredulous and astonished. I am glad at least that people such as Bishop George Bell of Chichester raised powerful voices against it at the time, at some cost to themselves. We owe it to them to revisit the argument.

*****

While I myself think the moral objections to the bombing are overpowering, and that retaliation for German barbarism simply doesn’t pass as a justification, I know that many seek to defend area bombing as a practical necessity of war. That is why I include this article, which explains that, at the time, notable military and scientific experts rightly warned that area bombing would not be as effective as claimed

Contemplating a solitary night in a hotel somewhere deep in the new East End of London, probably accompanied with pouring rain, I needed something exceptional to read. So I did something I had been meaning to do for years. I went to the London Library, membership of which is my greatest single self-indulgence, and hunted down in its haunted, mysterious Edwardian shelves a copy of C.P. Snow’s ‘Science and Government’, the text of the Godkin lectures which he gave at Harvard in 1960.

Just finding the little volume was fun. What a setting for a ghost story or an old-fashioned murder mystery this wonderful library would be, with its vertical maze of staircases, its iron floors, its long banks of shelves, illuminated only when a reader is searching them. Like H.G.Wells’s Magic Shop (a lovely short story which I re-read for the first time in years a few nights ago) it seems to stretch on and up and in forever, like a pleasing dream, and I have never failed to get slightly, if pleasantly, lost while in search of something. More than once I’ve had to ask one of the delightful staff to find the book I’m looking for, as its system of shelving is quite unique and not all that easy to follow, and the maps it issues are baffling to me.

You don’t need to belong to the London Library to get hold of Snow’s little book. I’m sure many other libraries either have it (it was published by the Oxford University press in 1960 and 1961, and presumably in the USA by a Harvard imprint) or can get it for you on inter-library loan. It’s quite slender. But the first half of it is absolutely astonishing. I’ve always known it contained the factual background to some scenes in Snow’s particularly moving novel about deep friendship, ‘The Light and the Dark’, in which the Second World War plan to bomb German cities, and the Whitehall row about it, forms at first the background and later, rather tragically, the foreground, to the final part of the story. But I didn’t know the half of it.

Snow was deeply involved in the British state’s effort to recruit science to prepare for the Second World War. As a man of the pretty hard left of the time (just how hard is hinted at in the another book in the series, ‘Corridors of Power’, in which Snow’s semi-autobiographical hero more or less admits to sympathy for the USSR) , he longed for Winston Churchill to be in office throughout the late 1930s, believing that a Churchill government would stand up to Hitler.

And he knew several extraordinary figures in the semi-secret world where government, science and politics intersect. One was the fascinating Maurice Hankey, who appears in some of the books (as I believe) as the politician Bevill. The others, who are the principal characters in ‘Science and Government’ are Sir Henry Tizard (whom Snow obviously admired greatly) and F.A. Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell), the mysterious German-born naturalized Briton, scientist and intriguer who became Winston Churchill’s chief scientific adviser. Snow is utterly fair to Lindemann, and seems to have liked him as far as it was possible to do so. He notes that both Lindemann and Tizard were abnormally physically brave, and both proved it by extraordinary flying exploits during the First World War. It is amazing that they survived.

But it would not be true to say he admired Lindemann.

The two scientists quite famously quarrelled over Lindemann’s belief that bombing German civilians would win the war.

Lindemann advocated, quite specifically, the bombing of German working class homes. ‘Middle class houses have too much space around them and so are bound to waste bombs’, as Snow explains the view. ‘Factories and “military objectives” had long since been forgotten, except in official bulletins, since they were much too difficult to find and hit.’

Lindemann argued that, given a total concentration of effort, bombing all the major towns of Germany could destroy 50 per cent of all houses.

Snow notes at this point, in a superb and (to me) moving piece of understatement: ‘It is possible, I suppose, that some time in the future people living in a more benevolent age than ours may turn over the official records and notice that men like us, well-educated by the standards of the day, men fairly kindly by the standards of the day, and often possessed of strong human feelings, made the kind of calculation I have just been describing’…. ‘…Will they think that we resigned our humanity? They will have the right’.

But he returns to the practical point. As well as being wicked, the policy was plain wrong.

Tizard said that Lindemann’s estimate of the possible destruction was five times too high. Patrick Blackett (a former naval officer who had become a noted physicist high in the scientific councils of the day and later the winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics and ennobled as Lord Blackett), independently advised that Lindemann’s estimate was six times too high (Both were slightly out. But nothing like as wrong as Lindemann was. Lindemann’s estimate of destruction was in fact *ten times too high*, as the post-war bombing survey revealed).

They might as well not have bothered to argue. ‘The minority view [that of Tizard and Blackett] was not only defeated, but squashed. The atmosphere was more hysterical than is usual in English official life; it had the faint but just perceptible smell of a witch-hunt. Tizard was actually called a defeatist’.

As Snow says‘It was not easy, for a man as tough and brave as men are made, and a good deal prouder than most of us, to be called a defeatist’

Perhaps worse was the internal exile into which Tizard was forced, denied all further influence, despite his great knowledge and experience, and exiled to the Presidency of Magdalen College in Oxford, his talents wasted at their very peak, and when they were most needed by the country he loved. No, it is not Soviet, there was no Siberian power station, and no bullet in the back of the head. But it is not English either. And it is stupid, stupid, stupid.

You will search in vain in most histories of the war for more than tiny passing references to Tizard. If there is another book which describes this moment of official insanity, I do not know where it is. I sat over my supper, shocked into immobility, my knife and fork abandoned and my glass of wine ignored, almost trembling with wasted anger over this awful story of long ago. Why had I till then been only dimly aware of it? Why is it trapped inside this small, obscure volume retrieved from deep in a rather impenetrable library? Why isn’t it taught in schools? Why hasn’t anyone written a play about it?

Well, partly because it would undermine the nonsensical cult of Winston Churchill, who for all his merits had many bad qualities which we are generally not supposed to go on about.

His complete support for Lindemann (who by the way was a non-drinking , non-smoking vegetarian with no known sexual relations with anyone, who lived on the whites of eggs, Port Salut cheese and olive oil, a strange boon companion for the boozy Edwardian WSC, who is said to have occasionally persuaded Lindemann to drink a glass of Cognac) simply crushed all opposition.

Well , that’s half the story, but – shocking as it is – there’s an even more worrying postscript. I reckon that most of my critics on the subject of bombing, the ones who say the Germans deserved it, the ones who think that burning and mangling women and children in their homes was a justified and effective means of war, the ones who tot up the diversion of resources to anti-aircraft measures and claim this somehow turned the scale in Russia (even though the bombing didn’t get properly under way until long after Hitler was beaten at Stalingrad and the course of the war was decided anyway), and yet who don’t find that the deliberate killing of civilians, in areas where opposition to Hitler was concentrated, was both stupid and immoral….

….I would reckon that even these people would say that the invention of radar and its deployment in the Home Chain on the eve of war was an unmixed blessing and possibly saved this country.

Well, if Churchill had been in power a few years earlier, there would have been no radar, because his pet Lindemann would have stopped its development.

The ‘Tizard Committee’ (officially the 'Committee for the Scientific Study of Air Defence’) began meeting in secret in January 1935. Tizard kept it small and concentrated, and picked its members with great care (Blackett being one of them) . They decided quickly that radar was the one thing to back. And they began the concentrated, brilliant, exhausting work on it (and on persuading the armed forces that it was what they needed) which would put Britain significantly ahead in its develop at a vital moment in world history.

As Snow says, most of the vital work (which made it available to the RAF in the summer of 1940)had been done by the end of 1936. The development of such devices is slow, and this was an amazing piece of prescience and competence.

And yet in 1935, Lindemann became involved. This was a result of a secret arrangement under which then then prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, agreed to allow Winston Churchill to sit on another secret committee on air defence, one for politicians rather than scientists.

With Churchill came Lindemann, who was placed on the Tizard Committee.

He very nearly wrecked it. It became full of ‘diatribes by Lindemann, scornful, contemptuous, barely audible, directed against any decision that Tizard had made, was making, or ever would make.’

Lindemann ‘demanded that [radar] should be put much lower on the priority list and research on other devices given the highest priority’.

These other devices included wholly impractical plans for infra-red detection, and the dropping of parachute mines and bombs *in front of hostile aircraft*, as if they were ships.

Two members of the committee, including Blackett, could bear it no longer and left. This happened after Lindemann abused Tizard so fiercely that the secretaries ‘had to be sent out of the room’.

With typical Whitehall cunning, the committee was reconstituted and Lindemann was somehow left off it. Radar survived and was ready in time.

But what if Churchill had by then been Premier?

Snow admits the paradox - he and his friends had at the time clamoured for Churchill to be brought back into the Cabinet, to strengthen our war preparations and stiffen our national sinews..

But if that had happened, Lindemann would have been able to do to Tizard in 1936 what he did to him in 1942 over bombing – deploy the power of Churchill to crush him.

And then what would have happened to radar? It would not have been remotely ready by 1940. Good speeches by WSC wouldn’t have won the Battle of Britain if there hadn’t been radar too.

‘With Lindemann instead of Tizard’, Snow concludes, ‘ it seems at least likely that different technical choices would have been made. If that had been so, I still cannot for the life of me see how the radar system would have been ready in time’.

It’s an interesting contrast between what we thought we knew, and what actually happened. I do urge you to read ‘Science and Government’. And I wish someone would write a play, or a TV drama about Tizard and Lindemann. That’s the way to get such things into history, now nobody knows any.

Are all other horrors of war so eclipsed by the Holocaust that we no longer have any usable scale by which we can condemn them? Can we condemn them as much as they ought (in my view) to be condemned without being falsely accused of equating them with the Holocaust?

Here is one answer. In his fine and necessary book ‘Orderly and Humane’ (about the disorderly and inhumane, but forgotten and ignored expulsions of ethnic Germans from eastern Europe after 1945) Professor R.M. Douglas wrote (referring to these expulsions) : ‘…the threshold for acknowledging mass human rights abuses for what they are cannot be the unprecedented barbarities of the Hitler regime. With the exception of the war years themselves, Europe West of the USSR had never seen, nor would it again see, so vast a complex of arbitrary detention - one in which tens of thousands, including many children, would lose their lives. That it largely escaped the attention of contemporaries elsewhere in Europe, and the notice of historians today, is a chilling commentary on the ease with which great evils in plain sight may go overlooked when they present a spectacle that international public opinion prefers not to see.’

Does the fact that Hitler’s Germany was responsible for the Holocaust mean that any measures taken against Germany during the 1939-45 war, or afterwards, are beyond effective condemnation? Does this fact mean that anyone who does condemn such measures is in effect excusing or minimising the Holocaust? Some have, repellently, tried to do so, attempting to equate them.

Does that mean that those (such as I) who emphatically do not equate them but who still regard the bombing of civilians as terrible and wrong, must fall silent for fear of being falsely lumped with such grisly propagandists?

My answer is ‘no’. It is perfectly possible to make a consistent and sincere condemnation of both the Holocaust and the British bombing of German civilians. It is perfectly possible to say that the bombing was wrong, while continuing to believe that the Holocaust was even more wrong, and rejecting any equivalence of the two.

The problem really lies in the ear of the hearer of such condemnations. A lot of British people do not want to know what we did in our bombing of Germany, and as a result remain in a deep and self-imposed ignorance. That ignorance allows them to remain ignorant of the he extent of the bombing (thinking that Dresden was the only serious incident for instance) .they are also uninformed about its true character, continuing to think that our main targets were military and industrial, rather than domestic. Knowing so little of its true character, they can then pretend to themselves that nothing truly bad was done, and even it was, that the mass murder of the Jews somehow excused it. If these barriers fail, they can claim that critics of the bombing are German propagandists trying to excuse the Holocaust. Or they can say that people such as I are attacking the RAF bomber crews, which I specifically refuse to do.

As I know to my cost, from various futile exchanges I have had with people who refuse to listen to facts and logic about the British bombing, many even to this day simply do not want to know what happened in the Dead Cities of Germany, many have a deluded belief that the civilian casualties were an unintended side effect of striking at military targets, many believe (wrongly) that the bombing of German cities in some way ‘saved’ Britain from invasion ( a danger which, if it ever existed, was in no way reduced by bombing) or contributed importantly to winning the war (which they did not, in reality do, as Hitler had already lost the war in the USSR before the major bombing started) .

It is arguable that they may have shortened the war by diverting aircraft and artillery from the Russian front, but it is equally arguable that they may have lengthened it, by depriving our anti-submarine forces of aircraft, and by diverting men and manpower to the destruction of cities and people, who could have been better used in attacking military and industrial targets.

Had they done so, of course, they would have achieved a similar diversion of artillery and aircraft from the eastern front. This rapidly becomes counterfactual and speculative, as it involves such things as the earlier development of long-range fighter escorts, consideration. But in truth it is a diversion from the moral argument – could it ever possibly be right to deliberately bomb civilians from the air?

One solution to this is to apply a presumption of mass guilt to the German people. They must have known, we are told, what was being done by Hitler. I cannot tell if this is so. The industrial mass-murder of Jews took place outside Germany, and it was never publicly stated as an aim. Yet rumours must have reached civilians from the combat zones and the districts in conquered territory where the murders were taking place. I think many knew, and many did not, and many suspected. The outrage of Kristallnacht in 1938 must have warned anyone in any doubt that the National Socialists were ready and willing to murder Jews for being Jews. Whether you could deduce the existence of Auschwitz from that , I am not so sure. The human mind would be inclined to think it impossible, unless presented with actual evidence.

As we know, certain people, either pitiable or disgusting, refuse to this day to believe the extermination camps existed, in spite of incontrovertible evidence and eyewitness testimony.

But I think we must exclude babies and children from this calculation. Yet they were not excluded from the bombing.

Then there is the question of whether they could have done anything about it. Once again, they could have done so. But how many of those who say ‘They should have protested’ would have done so themselves in that society? The threat of losing a job is usually enough to silence most forms of dissent in modern Britain. How much more effective would be the threat of torture, imprisonment and death, made against you and your family?

As I repeatedly point out, many Germans continued to resist, and to vote against Hitler long after most of us would have gone quiet, when the Brownshirt terror was already unleashed.. The English channel , which saved us form these dilemmas, is not a moral quality allowing us to claim superiority. It is just a physical fact, which saved us from being tested.

Maybe you think that failing to protest, even in such danger, is a sin of omission so serious that those who committed it, and their children, deserved to die in firestorms.

Well, that is a point of view, But those who believe it must be careful to apply the same stringency to themselves, and to their own acts of cowardice, probably known only to themselves.

We know for certain from the dispassionate official post-war bombing surveys that the effects on the German economy were far smaller than those imagined and claimed by the advocates of ‘dehousing’.

AS for ‘giving them some of their own medicine’, we also know that the British raids on Germany were far larger than those by Germany on Britain (Germany never had any equivalent of the Lancaster bomber) , and that wartime surveys showed that people who had experienced German bombing were *less* keen on bombing Germany in return than those who had not experienced it. The question of ‘who started it’ is also a good deal more complicated than we like to think. AS for the argument that ‘you weren’t there, you couldn’t know’, Bishop George Bell of Chichester (an unimpeachable patriot, by no means a pacifist and an early and principled opponent of the Nazis well-informed about events inside Germany) was ‘there’, experienced bombing himself and still opposed it. Indeed, he and those like him were in a minority, but the fact that he did and said what he did and said, shows that it was possible be ‘there’ and oppose it.

I often think that the expression ‘War Crime’ gets in the way of our understanding. If you don’t want to lose a war you must fight with ruthless violence. Almost every effective act of war ( I say ‘almost’, in case there are exceptions I can’t think of) would be a crime in civilian life. The only excuse is self-defence or justice, and – if we knew how terrible war was going to be – most of us would set the bar of justice a good deal higher than we do. I’m still not a pacifist – I tried that in my teens and found it impossible to sustain. But I am harder and harder to persuade of the need for war except in direct self-defence . Well-prepared and thoughtful deterrence, on the other hand, is a moral act of great value.

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03 September 2014 5:17 PM

And so the anniversary season continues, with the 75th anniversary of the day Britain and France fell into the trap they thought they had set for Hitler, and declared war on Germany for the sake of Poland. A year later France was an occupied vassal of Germany, and Britain a bankrupt subordinate of the USA. 75 years later both France and Britain are provinces in a German-dominated European Union. And yet it's still not done to wonder if our 1939 declaration of war might have been mistimed.

Of course, in the fine old tradition of British bluster, we didn’t actually do anything to help Poland as it was invaded, bombed, partitioned and abolished. But we did make some speeches, drop bundles of leaflets on German cows in the dark (sometimes the aircrews didn’t bother to undo the bundles, which could then be quite lethal) and move British troops on to the continent, where they could more easily be captured by the Germans.

But that’s another story. The contrast between the myth of 1939-45 and the reality of history is so huge that most people, confronted with any part of the truth, just goggle, gibber and angrily refuse to believe demonstrable facts.

Even 75 years later, it’s risky to examine those facts. I hope soon to take a look at Leo McKinstry’s new book on Operation Sealion, the German invasion that never was , and almost certainly never could have been. Mr McKinstry, as far as I can judge from a quick glance, has portrayed the rapid abandonment of this sketchy and undeveloped invasion plan as mainly a triumph of British resolve, organisation, courage, etc. In my view it was largely called off because of Hitler’s severe lack of interest in such an incredibly risky operation against a country he didn’t much care about, and which posed no significant threat to him. (Compare the colossal resources he deployed against Russia a year later). It was also caused by the reluctance of his own generals and admirals to get involved in such an obvious mare’s nest.

It is true that Britain, far from ‘standing alone’ in 1940, had all the resources of the Empire behind her, possessed efficient war industries, had a strong scientific sector and had, thanks to Chamberlain, rearmed quite efficiently for the purposes of home defence (though not for a continental land war). That is why the RAF was able to defeat the Luftwaffe over Southern England, though things might have been very different , and much worse, if we had committed the RAF to the defence of France a few months earlier.

The problem was that, having declared war on Germany in 1939 and promptly been defeated and expelled from the continent in 1940, Britain would have been in a very awkward position if Hitler had defeated the USSR. At that stage, all realistic hopes of a German defeat would ahve evaporated, and Britain would have had to sue for peace, with no need for an invasion by Germany. As long as Russia remained undefeated, there was still a choice between fighting on and capitulation, and the option of capitulation was rejected in 1940 by Churchill, to his eternal credit. A country which has declared war and failed to win it will not get good or generous terms if it then goes to its rival and asks for peace.

If we and France had left Poland to its own devices in April and May 1939, we would not have been in this very tricky position. Non-combatant neutrals have no need to make peace, or seek terms for it. Hitler would probably have inveigled Poland into an anti-Soviet alliance, with a chunk of Ukraine (yes, Ukraine again - it always comes into these things) as Poland’s prize for joining the attack on Stalin. Records show that Hitler and Ribbentrop did put such a scheme to Colonel Josef Beck, the thirsty Polish foreign minister, in early 1939.

And perhaps that development might have brought about renewed and serious talks between Britain, France and the USSR. These might have been more successful than the discussions aborted in summer 1939 when it was clear Hitler was willing to offer more to Stalin than we were. Given that we eventually gave Stalin a free hand over the whole of Central Europe, our gentlemanly hesitancy in 1939 looks rather unwise, but such is history, crammed with the monuments of unpleasant surprises. In any casen entry into the war in alliance with Russia would certainly have had a better chance of success than one in alliance with Colonel Beck.

Anyway, this brings me to my main summer reading project, Richard Overy’s ‘The Bombing War' , now available in a reasonably portable Penguin paperback (though I wish it was easier to navigate the footnotes).

Longstanding readers will recall my accounts of Anthony Grayling’s devastating account of the British bombing of Germany ‘Among the Dead Cities’, and of Sir Max Hastings’s excellent ‘Bomber Command’ . Others will, I hope, recall my championing, on Radio 4 and elsewhere, of Bishop George Bell (who lost two brothers in the Great War) and Major Richard Stokes MC MP (a highly-decorated Great War artillery offficer) , non-pacifist objectors to the deliberate bombing of German civilians. Also some may remember a discussion of the criticisms of the effectiveness of the bombing campaign levelled by Sir Henry Tizard, as described in an interesting series of lectures by C.P.Snow.

I get into no end of trouble for my position on this. I am told that I am unpatriotic, even now, for discussing it or for being distressed by the extreme and horrible cruelties inflicted by our bombs on innocent women and children, who could not conceivably be held responsible for Hitler’s crimes. On the contrary, I believe it is the duty of a proper patriot to criticize his country where he believes it to have done wrong.

I am told I am defaming the memory of the bomber crews. I have never done so, and never will. They had little idea of what they were doing, died terrible deaths in terrible numbers thanks to the ruthless squandering of life by their commanders, and showed immense personal courage. It is those who, knowing what was being done, ordered them into battle that I blame.

I am told that I am equating our bombing of Germany with the German mass murder of the Jews, when I would not dream of making such a comparison, never have done so and never will. I am told that I am excusing the mass murder of the Jews, when nothing could ever excuse it and I should certainly never attempt to do so. Is it still necessary to say that two wrongs do not make a right, and that one horribly wrong thing may be worse than another horribly wrong thing, and yet they may both still be horribly wrong, examined by themselves as actions?

I am told that I wasn’t there. This is true, but Bell, Stokes and Tizard were, and protested, much as I do and for the same reasons, moral in two cases, practical in one. I hope I should have had their courage. I think I can say that I am sometimes prepared to espouse unpopular causes.

I am told that the bombing was necessary because our survival was at stake. It quite simply wasn’t – Hitler had been irreversibly defeated at Stalingrad, and the USA were in the war, long before the mass bombing got under way.

I am also told that it was not our policy to kill civilians, and that they died accidentally as a result of attacks on military targets. This is flatly untrue, as I shall shortly show .

I am also told that the bombing was justified by its military effect upon Germany, and that it advanced Germany’s defeat. This is , to put it mildly, highly questionable.

In the following review (there will be two parts of which this is the first) of Professor Overy’s book, I shall adduce evidence which seems to me to devastate the case of those who continue to claim that the deliberate bombing of German civilians in their homes was militarily or morally justified. I would urge any who wish to attack this view to obtain and read the book before doing so. It is a formidable work of research and marshalled scholarship, dispassionate and carefully referenced:

The book ranges over much more than the British bombing of Germany. Did you know, for instance, that the Italian Air Force once bombed Tel Aviv? Details of German bombing of the USSR, and accurate accounts of the German bombing of Warsaw and Rotterdam in 1939 and 1940, are well worth reading, not least because of the large myths which have grown up around both of these events, quite horrible enough unadorned. The descriptions of the very heavy Allied bombing of German-occupied countries, and the strains this caused to their powerless populations, are particularly painful.

But these are things I must urge the reader of Professor Overy’s book to examine for himself or herself.

It is the British Empire’s bombing of Germany, and to some extent the parallel American bombing of Germany, which I wish to examine on the grounds of both military effectiveness and morality.

It is my view that the facts form a great cloud of witness against this form of warfare, which we must hope is never again adopted by any civilized nation, or indeed by any nation. I used to hold another view. Let us see if I, helped by Richard Overy, can persuade you.

On page 243 we learn that the deliberate bombing of cities in World War Two was not a retaliation against Hunnish barbarism, but definitely begun by the RAF, on 11th May 1940, long before the Blitz, with a raid on what was then known as Muenchen Gladbach (it is now, for tedious reasons, known as Moenchengladbach) in western Germany. This was not, as some claim, a response to Germany’s bombing of Rotterdam, because Rotterdam was not bombed till 14th May. The main reason for the attack seems to have been that Winston Churchill, who favoured bombing in general and had always suported the idea of a separate Air Force, had taken over from Neville Chamberlain, who opposed the bombing of cities on principle. The town was defined as a military-economic target and the attack was supposed to be in response to Germany’s invasion of the Low Countries, just begun.

The extent of the damage was slight. As discussed here, and particularly dealt with by Max Hastings, the RAF missed most of its targets hopelessly badly, and its inadequate bombing planes, mostly poorly designed and using outdated tactics, were blasted from the sky by the Luftwaffe in terrible numbers during the early part of combat.

On page 254, the language of British leaders began to take on a rather fearsome tone. Winston Churchill speculates in a letter (8th July 1940) to his friend and Aircraft Production Minister Lord (Max) Beaverbrook that an ‘absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland’ would help to Bring Hitler down. Arthur Harris kept a copy of this letter and told Andrew Boyle in 1979 ‘That was the RAF mandate’.

The killing of workers was an explicit policy. In June 1941 (p.257) we find an Air Ministry draft directive saying that ‘Continuous and relentless bombing of these workers and their utility services, over a period of time, will inevitably lower their morale, kill a number of them and thus appreciably reduce their industrial output.

In April of the same year (p.258) a policy review urged attacks on ‘working-class ‘ areas. In November that year (also p.258) a memorandum almost certainly written by Harris was asking if the time had not come to strike ‘against the people themselves’. In May (p.259), the Director of Air Intelligence welcomed an attack on the ‘the livelihood, the homes, the cooking heating, lighting and family life of…the working class’ (they were the lost mobile and most vulnerable to such an attack).

In November 1941, Sir Richard Peirse, then Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, told ‘the Thirty Club’ that his planes had nearly a year been attacking ‘the people themselves’, intentionally.(p.259)

‘I mention this because for a long time the Government for excellent reasons has preferred the world to think that we still held some scruples and attacked only what the humanitarians are pleased to call Military Targets. …I can assure you, gentlemen, that we tolerate no scruples.’

On the same page it is shown that senior officials knew of the policy but preferred the truth of it not to be widely known in case ‘false and misleading deductions’ were made.

A profoundly disturbing Air Staff memorandum(p.265) explicitly desires that towns should me made ‘physically uninhabitable’ and the people in them must be ‘conscious of constant personal danger’. The aim was to produce ‘destruction’ and ‘the fear of death’.

Harris himself wrote in April 1942 (p.287)’We have got to kill a lot of Boche before we win this war’. Harris, paradoxically to his credit, never lied to himself or anyone else about what he was doing. He never shied away from his purpose of killing Germans and wanted it acknowledged publicly. Perhaps he suspected that Churchill and others would seek to disavow the policy later.

On p.288 you will find details of Lord Cherwell’s famous minute calling for the de-housing of a third of Germany’s population (an aim based on totally wrong and exaggerated ideas of the power of bombing, as it turned out). ‘Investigation seems to show that having one’s house demolished is most damaging to morale’, it said, airily. You might say. You might also say that it would be hard to destroy that many houses intentionally without , equally intentionally, destroying many of their occupants.

There is plenty more of this in Professor Overy’s account. I’ll turn to the effectiveness, or otherwise, of the bombing in a future posting.

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I reproduce below Mr Jacubs’s two responses to my own rebuttal of his contribution.

I do so to explain why I shall not be engaging with him any further. I did so mainly because he persisted in posting comments which made personal attacks on me and my motives (and subsequently cast doubt on my loyalty to this country). I believe I have dealt with those. In his responses below he does not concede a single point or offer any sort of apology for these personal slights. He continues to misrepresent my position in various ways which suggest he has not made any effort to understand it, and in any case prefers to believe his version of what I think and say, to what I actually do think and say.

He does not acknowledge the clear and indisputable evidence (provided by Harris himself without any sort of hesitation or equivocation, and fatal to Mr Jacubs’s position) that Arthur Harris knowingly followed a policy of deliberately attacking civilians in their homes. In response to my many rebuttals ( I would say refutations) of his various claims against me and against my arguments, he neither counters, nor does he concede. So far as I can tell, he remains unmoved in any way by anything I have said, and I rather expect that he will be posting more of his dreary and unresponsive assaults on my character in the months to come. So be it. Worse things happen in big ships, as my father used to say. I now know it will not be worth responding.

The argument was, as all arguments are, useful to me in helping me to refine my position. It may have been useful to other contributors and readers, unfamiliar with this important dispute. I am glad if this was so. As for me, I now know that there is no point in arguing with Mr Jacubs, as he is not actually interested in considering any point of view but his own on this subject (believing as he does that those who differ from him are motivated by disloyalty and other ignoble influences and personal failings) , and I shall not do so again.

I am chided by one reader for arguing with Mr Jacubs, because of his age. Mr Jacubs has made no such complaint on his own behalf, and I would point out that he picked this fight, in a most aggressive manner. He has also lost it, but like so many people who lose arguments, he is sublimely unaware of the fact.

This is what Mr Jacubs has said:

‘I have read Mr Hitchen's reply and have come to a conclusion on this matter. I will make some comment in reply but this can go on and on forever. I do have not, do not and will never believe that the bombing of Germany by Bomber Command and the USAAF both of whom killed thousands of civilians was a deliberate plan to do just that. I will say here that I am not a fan of Bomber Harris but not for the reason given by Mr Hitchens. I firmly believe that Harris overdid everything with regard to the bombing campaign. He sent far too many aircraft loaded with far too many bombs to far too many targets. Thus he was responsible for the death of thousands of RAF aircrew. That said I do not believe his flamboyant speeches indicate he deliberately target innocent civilians. Many mistakes were made and lives (on both sides) lost because of them. However this discussion was originally about the bombing campaign and whether it had shortened the war and I believe it did by anything up to a year. Somewhere or other I know Albert Speer agreed with this view. This discussion then moved to the subject of civilian deaths which is highly emotive and like Mr Hitchens I am being drawn into personal accusations which do not in any way contribute positively to this discussion. This whole matter was initially raised because of Bishop Bell's wartime speeches. I have stated clearly that I regard him as a good man who in my opinion spoke misguidedly at a sensitive period in the largest global conflict of all time. I clearly stated he was the opposite of being pro Nazi and I am rather surprised Mr Hitchens had not clearly read my comment. I know a fair amount about the history of WW2 for I lived through the worst of it and survived the blitz by a few yards. I could quote other people who I and my parents knew and suffered dreadfully, much worse than I, during the Battle of Britain and the months of the night time bombing. I am sure Mr Hitchen's knowledge exceeds mine in various fields but neither of us can conclusively prove our point. Mr Hitchens has said I am obviously an angry man (or some such phrases) in many parts of his arguments. I totally admit to that. I have both lived through and read the history of that dreadful war. A close family friend and a hero of mine lived just 5 doors away. He was a bomb aimer on Lancasters and was killed over Germany in November 1944. His mother died of a broken heart and his father soon after that. This story has indeed contributed to my anger. The Germans started this war – that is to say the attack on our country – and men like my friend Alan who was just 22 were drawn into the conflict to die a horrible death. I am so thankful that the Bomber Command memorial has at last been erected and dedicated to the 55,500 men who died. The war Germany started cost the lives of 451,000 Britons. I weep for them all for they would all have lived but for Germany and the Nazis. I had prepared answers to most of Mr Hitchen's replies to mine which were in reply to his original article. This argument is both emotive and perpetual. He says I support the killing of babies, I rightly take exception to this quite awful slight and then no doubt he will come back with further slights. I go on refuting them and try hard not to do the same to him but what is it all for? These are no longer comments and replies – it is a full scale no holds barred contest of words – some unpleasant, some accusing, some unkind, most untrue ad infinitum. I have just read through the draft replies I had prepared to post tonight and can see how this is losing its substance. Becoming a little bit “ya booish” on both sides. Mr Hitchens might disagree but I can see what I see. So to sum up from my side. 1. I believe the bombing of Germany by all sides was absolutely necessary and considerably shortened the war. 2. At no time do I believe it was the intention of anyone (including Harris) to deliberately target civilians. I do accept that there was an intention to bomb and kill war workers who were clearly legitimate targets. 3. I accept as I always have that the killing of women (not involved in war work) and children was dreadful but in my opinion unavoidable. 4. I believe that Bishop Bell and the minority who supported him were misguided.

I would like to make some final points regarding the recent argument with Mr Hitchens over the bombing of Germany. It started as a journalistic column but turned into a full scale argument largely due to Mr Hitchen's intransigence and my resulting “red mist of anger”. Let me thank those people here who supported my stance whether wholeheartedly or in parts. This is to me a very emotive subject and let us be honest no one will ever know for sure the ultimate effect the bombing campaign had on the outcome of WW2. I lived through some of the worst of the German bombing (the blitz) spending every night down our shelter for months on end. I saw the thousands of children being evacuated from London and witnessed London burning night after night. I remember the tears and outright anger (which I found difficult to understand at the time) of two women whose husbands had been killed in the war. I remember coming up from our shelter to find three houses opposite destroyed with – as I found out later – loss of life in each house. I watched a landmine descend by parachute and destroy a local golf pavilion killing 3 occupants. I remember making a visit to Ipswich near where I was born sometime in 1943 and joining in the cheers as bombers of the USAAF flew overhead to bomb Germany in the daytime. I remember the V1 flying bombs (doodlebugs) on the first morning they were launched when one landed a few hundred yards away killing 35 people including many damage repair workers on a bus. I remember the thuds of the V2 rockets as they landed day and night for weeks. I remember going up to London with my parents on VE day in May 1945 to cheer Churchill and the Royal Family. That was a great day. These experiences moulded my life and my views on life. I came of age as it were in the 1950's which was a peaceful period of hope in which my family,friends and neighbours came to terms with life. I did my National Service (3 years) in Germany half of which was in Hamburg. In 1952 half the city had been magnificently rebuilt the other half was still in ruins. This did not however influence one way or the other my views about our bombing them. Finally I just wish to say that my great anger is aimed at those who only read of this war to end all wars and then past verdict on what they consider our wrongdoings. With some it is an obsession 70 years after the conflict to seek out anything negative they can find, win appraisal from those on the political left and stand patriotism on its head by blackening the memory of those who fought for the freedom we have today. I frequently thank God for that freedom – a freedom that is now I fear being rapidly eroded.

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01 April 2013 1:34 PM

My reply to Mr Jacubs’s response follows. My words are in bold type. I should stress here that I have not attempted to dispute everything in Mr Jacubs’s posting. That would take too long. But I have inserted my responses after the passages which seem to me to be the most important

Mr Jacubs wrote:

To me there is one group of people by no means a small group whom I regard with deep suspicion. They are politicians, lawyers and journalists. That said I will try to reply to Mr Hitchens but it will be less concise than I would have liked because I have just acquired a disgusting chest infection. I accused him of loathing all things to do with Britain's contribution in two world wars. Well that was the impression he gives me. Was it sweeping? Yes it was. The problem here is that Mr H conveys his feelings of utter contempt for some occurrence or some person or organisation and then passes on to another subject.

If one feels strongly about some point in recent history as I do and I keep reading Mr Hitchen's views to the contrary when I was around at the time and he wasn't I think I have a right to get angry.

I respond: This is exactly why I cite George Bell, and his ally Richard Stokes MP. They were there at the time. Stokes won the MC as an artillery officer in the 1914-18 war, and was no sort of pacifist (Vera Brittain, who also protested, was a pacifist and I therefore do not call her in aid. Total pacifists have no agonising to do on such occasions. But they must also accept the greater consequences of their beliefs, which I am not prepared to do). Bishop Bell (who gave up his Palace in Chichester to others during the war) lived in Brighton while it was being bombed, and once helped rescue a group of terrified people from a house in which an unexploded incendiary was lodged. Bell and Stokes 'were there'. They spoke out. People were angry with them. They continued to speak because they believed that they were speaking for truth and justice. Their example is one which I hope I would have followed had I been there.

Loathing may not have been a word he used but it certainly comes over as such.

I respond: This won’t do. He cannot accuse me of feeling emotions which I have not expressed, because he chooses to believe, without evidence, that I hold them. This is poisoning the wells of argument. All kinds of things may ‘come over as such’ to him, but his state of mind is not evidence of anything other than his state of mind, and he should learn this simple rule when conducting an argument, if he hopes to get anywhere. He should produce his evidence of this alleged ‘loathing’, or reconsider his claim. It is he who seems to me to be consumed with wrath in this discussion, and there is much evidence of this in the intemperate language that he repeatedly uses.

I have never mentioned anyone in his family so I don't know why he brings them into it.

I reply : I ‘bring them into it’ because Mr Jacubs accused me of ‘absolute loathing’( an unequivocal expression) ‘for *all* (my emphasis) things to do with Britain’s contribution to winning both world wars’. If this were true, then I would of necessity loathe (absolutely) all those involved, including my father, mother and grandfather. Plainly, I do not do so. I thought this neatly demonstrated that he was mistaken. I still do. If he does not understand this it can only be because he chooses not to. I wish he would accept that he was mistaken.

I could do the same but my concern has been with the decision of our WW2 leaders to promote all out bombing of Germany. His detestation for Harris I find disgusting and certainly implies a loathing of the man to me and why he goes on about the conditions of the aircrew when on missions – something we all know about - I do not understand. I have never said he blamed them.

I reply : This is incorrect. He clearly stated that I ‘assume the worst’ of Bomber Command, a phrase which must be taken to include those who flew in that Command.

I do actually read what he writes and yes to some extent through a mist of fury because I loved the country we had then and the way our men fought for it.

I reply : And I do not?

He mocks our pseudo religion “We won the War”. Yes Mr H we bloody well did win it.

I reply : Though we did not ultimately lose it, we did not win it by any normal definition of victory. We ended it far poorer and weaker than we were when we started. We have been in rapid national decline ever since. 68 years after that war, our principal enemy is far stronger and more prosperous than we are. We, by contrast, were impoverished by the war, lost our empire as a direct result of it, and became the subservient allies of two other major powers, both of which imposed their war aims on us. We have since lost control over our own borders, our foreign and trade policies are directed by others and 80% of our laws are made abroad. We utterly failed to achieve the aim for which we went to war, namely the restoration of Polish independence. That had to wait until 1989 and was not achieved by us. Some would say that the fact that Poland lost much of its eastern territory for good, and that it subsequently submitted to indirect German rule via EU membership, meant that Poland, as it was in 1939, never regained its independence. So, we may have been on the winning side, but we did not win

We never started it.

I reply: This is, alas, not the case. Germany did not seek war with us and did not declare war on us. Germany, whose ambitions lay in the east, had little interest in us. We declared war on Germany in defence of Polish independence – a policy we had no means of enforcing as we had no significant army in Europe. We did so because the foolish diplomatic bluff of the Polish guarantee failed to convince anyone (except the Poles, who as a result failed to make a territorial compromise with Germany).

We were peaceful and desperately hoping another war would not come.

I reply : This is an interesting point. It is true that a lot of tripe is talked about the pre-war era. The Labour Party, for instance, opposed rearmament until the last minute, then blamed the Tories for being ‘Guilty Men’. Labour had no clear policy towards German expansion except a vague aspiration towards ‘collective security’ , which was assumed by most people to imply some sort of reliance on the Soviet Union. Well, the USSR made clear in its failed talks with Britain in 1939 that its price for an alliance was a pretty free hand in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states. So it was a choice between ‘appeasing’ one bloodstained dictatorship, or ‘appeasing’ another.

No doubt the British people hoped for peace, which is why enormous crowds cheered Chamberlain when he came back from Munich in 1938. What sane person hopes for war? They certainly had no desire to go to war for Prague, and we couldn’t have done any more good to Czechoslovakia in 1938 than we did for Poland in 1939-40 (look at a map). But hoping for peace doesn’t necessarily get you peace. Hard, cynical preparation for war (which was under way, though for a kind of war that didn’t happen, mainly defensive , deterring attacks on our own country and on the Empire) , combined with alert and unsentimental diplomacy (which was entirely lacking) , might have done.

You and the other re-writers of history

I respond: What is this ‘re-writing’ of which he repeatedly speaks? What have I rewritten? The facts of which I write have been known for years. A.J.P.Taylor attacked the Polish guarantee while I was still at school. Opposition to bombing of German civilians, on military grounds existed at high levels in British politics and among the military in the early 1940s. Bell and Stokes opposed it knowledgeably at the time (Bell took advice from Liddell Hart, a prominent military expert of the time).

can only read about the war and choose to always to see it from the point of view of the enemy.

I respond : This is an inexcusable calumny, throat infection or no, for which I feel entitled to require a withdrawal and an apology.

I do not regard women and children as my enemies. As for the rest, I am not prepared to have a patriotism contest with Mr Jacubs, but I defy him to produce a grain of evidence for his very serious allegation, undoubtedly defamatory if I chose to make an issue of it. Everything I write about this subject is written from the point of view of someone who wishes the best for his country, and hopes that we may learn from mistakes in the past.

You cannot even begin to understand the views of those who had to be involved because they are no longer here.

I reply: Perhaps not. I am not seeking to do so, though , like anyone of my age growing up in a service family, and with family connections in cities, such as Portsmouth and Liverpool, which were heavily bombed, I may claim to have a reasonable knowledge of what was involved and of how people felt about it.

You just keep picking on the tiny minority who protested at the time and there are hardly any left to answer you back.

I reply: What does it matter if they were a tiny minority? Where does it say that majorities are automatically right? If one just man stands up for right and law , against everyone around him, he does not cease to be just because he is a ‘tiny minority’. What principle is Mr Jacubs arguing for here? That the majority is always right and the minority should be swept aside? I have found no shortage of people ready to ‘answer me back’. I have spent much of the past few months in correspondence with them.

Of course this country's leaders made mistakes in winning that horrible war. My point has always been why keep picking on them when the real horrors were perpetrated by the enemy?

I respond: I have clearly responded to this already. Mr Jacubs does not seem to have read or understood what I wrote. I here repeat it, in extra large letters, in the hope that he will pay attention to it this time.

‘Does he really not grasp that it is precisely because this wrong deed was done by my own country’s government and armed forces that I have a duty to acknowledge and criticise it, if I think it to be wrong *on principle*, as I do? It is on the basis of that same principle that I condemn all such things. What would he think of a modern-day German (or Russian) who refused to condemn the long list of misdeeds he produces below? Do these wickednesses in any way cancel out the wrongness (if it was wrong, and I believe it was, and I haven’t seen him explain why it wasn’t) of our deliberate killing of German civilians? How does this happen? What is the moral system which enables him to do so? If they don’t, and if each deed stands on its own, then the wrongness of the others has no effect on the wrongness of our bombing. In general, in working out what my position is, he may assume that I am against the deliberate killing of civilians in war on principle, whoever does it. If he is not on principle against this (and he appears not to be) then what is his objection to these deeds when done by others? On what consistent moral code (there is no other sort) is it based?

He says it is all right to kill enemy soldiers in battle as if it were easy to do that without collateral casualties and damage.

I reply. No I do not say this. Of course I accept the need to kill enemy soldiers in battle. But I do not pretend that this (or any other form of modern warfare) can be conducted without unintended damage and death. He is not reading what I say. I wrote : ‘ I sadly accept the inevitability of unintended civilian casualties in modern war.'

So it would appear from that statement that we should only have bombed front line German troops. We should have left their war machine untouched until their troops were repelled to the cities.

I reply : there is nothing in what I have said which in any way justifies the above absurd piffle. I don’t think it and haven’t said it.

Mr Jacubs continues : He sadly accepts the “inevitability of unintended civilian casualties in modern war”. However when that does happen he accuses the war leaders of deliberately targeting civilians. I find that accusation shocking.’

I reply : Well, it is time that he stopped finding it shocking. Arthur Harris himself (in words I first quoted here on 1st July 2012, made it quite clear (and no serious historian contests this anyway) that the policy involved the deliberate killing of civilians, and was not collateral damage. I am amazed that Mr Jacubs has not absorbed this simple point by now, running as it does through everything I have written. The killing of German civilians was deliberate. As I wrote in July 2012

‘Arthur Harris had no such excuse. Nor did the architects of the deliberate bombing of German civilians in their homes. That, by the way, is what we did. As Harris himself said, the aim of his offensive should be unambiguously described as 'the destruction of the German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilised life throughout Germany'.

TO REMOVE all doubt (and Harris was annoyed that Winston Churchill wouldn't admit the truth in public), [he said] it was aimed at 'the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale at home and on the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing'. He stated 'these are not by-products of attempts to hit factories'. (Arthur Harris to Sir Arthur Street, Under Secretary of State, Air Ministry, October 25, 1943).

I am not going to answer him point for point as he would dearly like. This way the main issue gets avoided. Will I apologise for the use of various strong adjectives in my posting to him? No I will not because as he well knows this is avoiding the issue again plus it is being over pedantic. At no time did the wartime government set out to target civilians in their homes.

I reply : This is simply incorrect. See Harris quotes above.

He has no evidence to support such a claim.

I reply : Yes I do. See Harris quotes above.

He knows full well that when targeting cities because they contained factories and businesses connect directly to the war that civilians would be killed – just as they were in London, Coventry, Liverpool and in the Baedeker raids etc.

I reply, but in this case, we deliberately sought to kill civilians. see Harris quotes above.

Yes I believe we retaliated in the only way open to us and in hindsight it is so easy to say we over retaliated.

But had he been here in 1940 to 1945 Mr Hitchens would have seen people cheering our bombers on their way to Germany night after night. I saw it from my birth town in East Anglia. In 1940 we were at the mercy of the Third Reich waiting for the coming invasion, then came the Battle of Britain and the blitz. All we had was the remnants of our defeated army and the beginnings of our bomber force. We out produced the Germans in heavy bombers which we had developed solely (I have to keep saying this) because it was all we had to hit back with until as we hoped the Americans would join us in defeating the Nazis. This is the justification Mr Hitchens asked me for. He keeps going on about moral codes. Tell that to the survivors of the Holocaust. Tell that to the relatives of those bombed in their sleep like my neighbours. I watched as the ambulances took away the bodies and was too young to fully understand at the time.

I watched a film on TV some years ago when a German woman survivor in I believe Cologne said she understood why they were bombed simply because they did it to us first. She even admitted her original worship of Hitler. I do not have any idea how many shared her view but how honest of her. He keeps coming up with alternative targets for our bombers. This is typical of history re-writers, they are forever saying “why didn't we do this or that?” We did what seemed right at the time. If we had had months to think out all our tactics in trying to win this dreadful conflict we would undoubtedly have done many things differently. He then implies I might be suggesting he doesn't condemn the appalling massacres I mentioned. He knows full well I did not say or imply that. If I thought that I would not entertain a discussion with him. His inference that I might be doing so is insulting to me and I would expect an apology from him about that.

My reason as he well knows for mentioning all those horrors was to emphasise my point about his continually picking on what he sees as the horrors committed by the British.

I reply: I have answered this. I have reproduced my answer above in very large letters. It is time he acknowledged this.

I wonder also why Mr Hitchens is “troubled” “by these things” as he grows closer to his grave. By “these things” he appears to talking of all things to do with the war including the use of the atomic bombs. I am not troubled by anything from the past but I am certainly troubled by the prospects for the future. I am annoyed and upset by people like Mr Hitchens when because of their world experiences, their education, their reading etc. they feel equipped to re-write history. When I said “they” tried to kill me and my family by “they”, I meant (oh God do I really have to spell this out?) the Luftwaffe, the German military machine, the German government, all those who supported the German war effort, all those who voted Hitler and the Nazis and their supporters into power. Why does he keep on about the suffocated and burned to death of Hamburg and Dresden?

I reply : Precisely because the majority of these people did not vote for Hitler, or support his government, or desire war, but were powerless civilians, in many cases anti-Hitler Social Democrats who continued to oppose Hitler even after the unleashing of the Brownshirt terror (Would Mr Jacubs have had the courage to do this? I wonder) . More conclusively still, many of them were children, whom no reasonable person could blame for the misdeeds of a government. . Hamburg (for example) was the most anti-Hitler city in Germany. These people did not try to kill Mr Jacubs. Yet he supports a policy which deliberately sought to kill them ( see Harris quote above, for clear evidence that it was dleiberate) .

The German aircrew can come and kill us in our homes but – he implies - that does not give us the justification to bomb a distant German city? We should just sit in our bombed out homes and say we must behave in a civil and Christian way about this. We must not let our airmen retaliate even though it is our only means of doing so.

As tired as I get of saying this I will never the less continue to do so. Mr Hitchens was not here sitting in the rubble of his home having lost his family. I am talking all the time about how we felt here at home being bombed in the war. This is the point lost to Mr Hitchens. In the war. Not seventy years after the war but in the war. I find it hard to get into the mind of someone obsessed with the horrors of bombing in a country which started by bombing us. The obsession goes on when he talks of the baked corpses of their children in suitcases. Where did he get that from? No doubt he read it somewhere. It's all what we the British did to the poor Germans. I know I am wasting my breath here – that's obvious but his continual digging out of these what I find sick clichés nauseates me. Yes so does war in all its forms.

Had the Germans remained neutral after WW1 and Europe remained a united force for good of course there would have been no burnt corpses or suffocated families in their cellars but they didn't – did they? They started a war and committed some of the worst crimes against humanity in all of history. However – for the umpteenth time – we were the innocents – Hitler and the Nazis were the criminals and all Mr H can do is call us criminals because we retaliated in kind. He says he has re written nothing! Yes he has. Anyone who claims we fought a bad war is to my mind re writing it. He is perpetually looking at the war from the point of view of a survivor of British bombing who is carrying the dead burnt corpse of their child in a suitcase. He never does it from the standpoint of an English survivor of German bombing. I thank God that I and my family survived (just) and that I had not been born a German living in a bombed German city. It was war – Germany started the bombing and I survived. I am tired of him keeping on telling me how they suffered – we suffered because of them.

I reply. I have answered all this many times.

I am not surprised he has suffered a great deal of anger from our veterans but as he so often says he is a hate figure and he sure revels in it. Yes he has attacked the veterans for when he attacks their leaders – Harris for example who most aircrew admired

I reply : How do we know? Horrifying numbers of aircrew died as a result of Harris’s profligacy with human life. How can he say with such certainty that they admired him?

– he attacks them – that is why he had abuse from them.

I reply : I do not attack them, and have clearly stated this many times, and every time Mr Jacubs repeats this false allegation he diminishes his case in the eyes of all reasonable people.

I have had no abuse from anyone who served in Bomber Command. I tend to find that actual veterans of dangerous combat are a good deal less enthusiastic about warfare than those who were not there. My father, who served in what many believe the worst theatre of war, was certainly no jingo.

Why should he go to America? Because they don't tolerate criticism of their military in all wars as easily as we do. However I am sure he can produce some evidence to the contrary. One more point - perhaps the best way of summing up my argument. If the killing of civilians – deliberate as with the atomic bombs – or non deliberate – yes non deliberate as in the bombing of Germany results in the shortening of the war with the consequent saving of many more civilian lives it has to be justified. Ending any war as speedily as possible has to be morally right.

I reply. This is a highly dubious statement. Leaving aside the sudden conversion of Mr Jacubs to the saving of civilian lives, which most of the time he seems happy to expend, does he then think that the torture of PoWs for information, the mass slaughter of captured prisoners, to save food, time and guards, and the use of atomic weapons on German cities would have been justified , because they brought a speedy end to the war? All these things would no doubt have accelerated its end. If not, why not? Once you cast aside moral principles and law, there is nothing you cannot do - as George Bell pointed out .

WW2 was not just a war between Germany and the countries it attacked and invaded. It was a fight by the Allies to put an end to the atrocities being committed by the Germans on a massive scale.

I reply: This is demonstrably untrue, and this demonstrable untruth is a significant pillar of the myth of the ‘The Good War’ . No effort at all was made by the Allies to halt the atrocities of the Third Reich, even once reliable information on the death camps was available to the Allied leadership. Many of the casualties of our bombing were in fact slave labourers who ( as we knew) were already being maltreated by the Germans. In any case, or principal European ally, the USSR was regularly committing atrocities throughout its conduct of the war, espcially intensively at the end. As I have written elsewhere, this country and the USA, in the Potsdam agreement, knowingly agreed to the mass expulsions of ethnic Germans from Central Europe, which predictably led (it was predicted by officials) to terrible numbrs of appalling atrocities. This was a direct consequence of the war, as we had waged it.

Therefore the means we adopted in defence and attack had to justify the end. That is how I see it and it is the reason I find Mr Hitchen's views on the conduct of our war leaders reprehensible.

I reply : And it is precisely because Mr Jacubs has adopted the dreadful maxim that the means justifies the end (the immoral code of the wicked throughout all history, and the antithesis of Christianity) that I find his beliefs so reprehensible.

Below is an extract from The US Strategic Bombing Survey of 1945 which I feel offers some support for my views regarding the success of the bombing campaign. THE UNITED STATES STRATEGIC BOMBING SURVEY September 1945 (Extract) The Survey has made extensive studies of the reaction of the German people to the air attack and especially to city raids. These studies were carefully designed to cover a complete cross section of the German people in western and southern Germany and to reflect with a minimum of bias their attitude and behavior during the raids. These studies show that the morale of the German people deteriorated under aerial attack. The night raids were feared far more than daylight raids. The people lost faith in the prospect of victory, in their leaders and in the promises and propaganda to which they were subjected. Most of all, they wanted the war to end. They resorted increasingly to "black radio'' listening, to circulation of rumor and fact in opposition to the Regime; and there was some increase in active political dissidence -- in 1944 one German in every thousand was arrested for a political offense. If they had been at liberty to vote themselves out of the war, they would have done so well before the final surrender. In a determined police state, however, there is a wide difference between dissatisfaction and expressed opposition. Although examination of official records and those of individual plants shows that absenteeism increased and productivity diminished somewhat in the late stages of the war, by and large workers continued to work.

However dissatisfied they were with the war, the German people lacked either the will or the means to make their dissatisfaction evident.

I reply : I do wonder how bold Mr Jacubs would have been, under the eye of the Gestapo. It is easy to criticise the caution of others from a safe place.

The city area raids have left their mark on the German people as well as on their cities. Far more than any other military action that preceded the actual occupation of Germany itself, these attacks left the German people with a solid lesson in the disadvantages of war. It was a terrible lesson; conceivably that lesson, both in Germany and abroad, could be the most lasting single effect of the air war.

I respond: I have dealt with this emotional and irrational stuff over and over again, and will not waste further time on it. Even children know that two wrongs do not make a right. The simple point is this ‘Was it right or wrong for this country to bomb German civilians in their homes as an act of deliberate policy?’ It may well be that the bombing left a mark on Germany. What about the mark that it left on this country, in which formerly civilised, gentle people spring up to defend the deliberate killing of civilians, including babes in arms? Can nobody see the moral danger of such opinions?

Below are my comments regarding Bishop Bell. I have been looking at the profile of Bishop Bell. To start with he was very pro German.

I respond: This is a misleading statement. I can only hope that it is not intended to be misleading. Readers here must understand that the term ‘Pro-German’ here does not mean (as some might mistakenly suppose) that Bishop Bell was ever or in any way a sympathiser with the Nazi regime or the Third Reich. On the contrary, he was one of the first British people to discover the true nature of this regime, and his friends in Germany were its courageous opponents, many of whom died at Hitler’s hands for their principles.

He had a great affinity to the German church, had close friends within the German church and greatly admired German architecture especially the churches. He was chairman for the International Christian Committee for German Refugees. He singled out German Jews for prayer and helped German church families to come to Britain before the war. During the war Bishop Bell helped German prisoners of war.

I reply . This (that he helped German PoWs) is news to me, and I would be grateful for any reference to it. He certainly helped German refugees from Nazi persecution who had been wrongly interned on the absurd assumption that they were secret pro-Nazis. Some newspapers falsely accused him of being 'pro-German' at this time, and falsely stated that he was seeking to help Nazi prisoners. This kind of lying happens a lot in wartime.

and our own conscientious objectors. I think that little lot proves one thing – Bishop Bell was definitely very fond of Germany and the German people. I am not for one moment implying he was pro Nazi for the complete opposite is clearly the case. But it does explain why he spoke as he did in the H of L about our bombing of Germany. Fortunately for this country and perhaps the wider world he was not listened to. Even the then Archbishop of York replied "it is a lesser evil to bomb the war-loving Germans than to sacrifice the lives of our fellow countrymen..., or to delay the delivery of many now held in slavery".

He wanted the resumption of “friendly relations” with Germany

I respond : He wanted this after the war. I think there is something disreputable about this segment of Mr Jacubs's posting, which is willing to wound but afraid to strike. There is no suggestion that Bishop Bell was at any stage against the prosecution of the war to its end. He disputed the methods, a very different thing.

and he opposed measures aimed to destroy the morale of Germany.

I respond. I do not know what he means here by ‘measures aimed to destroy the morale’ . Bishop Bell opposed the deliberate bombing of civilians (which he knew was taking place but which the government did not at the time admit was its policy (though Harris did, see above) . Ministers might have portrayed the bombing as ‘measures aimed at destroying morale’. Bell also opposed the views of those such as Lord Vansittart who (much like Mr Jacubs) regarded the whole German people as being the enemy, and sought to distinguish between the state and the people.

What I wonder would his view have been if a close family member had been in say Auschwitz.

I reply : Much the same. His close friend Dietrich Bonhoeffer was imprisoned by the Nazis in Buchenwald concentration camp and murdered by the Nazis in Flossenburg concentration camp. Bonhoeffer’s biographer records: ‘ Bonhoeffer was led away just as he concluded his final Sunday service and asked an English prisoner (Payne Best) to remember him to Bishop George Bell of Chichester if he should ever reach his home: "This is the end — for me the beginning of life."'

Would his concern of German morale remained the same? Bell asked Anthony Eden to publicly explain that the British had no wish to enslave Germany – only to remove the Nazis. What a ridiculous statement - of course we had no intention to “enslave” Germany.

I reply. There were certainly those among the allies (see the Morgenthau plan, formulated by the wartime US Treasury Secretary of that name ) who hoped for the more or less total dismemberment, humiliation and crushing of Germany and its people after victory. Morgenthau’s scheme would have been very close to enslavement. As Herbert Hoover pointed out : ‘"There is the illusion that the New Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a 'pastoral state'. It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it."

We just wanted to save our country from enslavement. For Bell to have even thought he could influence the German population to get rid of Hitler by any means including assassination was so naive it beggars belief.

Even if Hitler had been killed in some plot or other it is a certainty other top Nazi leaders would have taken over and been even more ruthless than before. A look at the reprisals after Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in Prague in 1942 and after the abortive attempt on Hitler's life in 1945 for example show clearly how the Nazis increased their reign of terror and determination to fight on with even greater vigour. It must be mentioned here that Roosevelt's insistence on Germany's unconditional surrender at Casablanca in 1943 created a situation where Germany would now fight to the bitter end. This undoubtedly lengthened the war and caused hundreds of thousands more deaths on all fronts and on all sides. Maybe Bishop Bell criticised Roosevelt's decision but if so I have yet to hear about it.

I reply: Well , he won’t be able to say that again. Bell was a prominent critic of the ‘Unconditional Surrender’ policy.

A German surrender with acceptable conditions would have obviated the need for intensive bombing and also discussion like this need not have taken place. Bishop Bell was an undoubtedly good man who in my opinion was fortunately not listened to by the government of the day.

I thought it would be helpful if his response, which is lengthy, was published here as a free-standing article. I have broken it up into paragraphs, and apologise to Mr Jacubs, or to any grammarians, for my rearrangement. I just thought it was more easily readable here (I have removed one repeated word. Otherwise the text is unaltered). I will publish a reponse, when time allows.

To me there is one group of people by no means a small group whom I regard with deep suspicion. They are politicians, lawyers and journalists. That said I will try to reply to Mr Hitchens but it will be less concise than I would have liked because I have just acquired a disgusting chest infection. I accused him of loathing all things to do with Britain's contribution in two world wars. Well that was the impression he gives me. Was it sweeping? Yes it was. The problem here is that Mr H conveys his feelings of utter contempt for some occurrence or some person or organisation and then passes on to another subject.

If one feels strongly about some point in recent history as I do and I keep reading Mr Hitchen's views to the contrary when I was around at the time and he wasn't I think I have a right to get angry. Loathing may not have been a word he used but it certainly comes over as such. I have never mentioned anyone in his family so I don't know why he brings them into it. I could do the same but my concern has been with the decision of our WW2 leaders to promote all out bombing of Germany. His detestation for Harris I find disgusting and certainly implies a loathing of the man to me and why he goes on about the conditions of the aircrew when on missions – something we all know about - I do not understand. I have never said he blamed them. I do actually read what he writes and yes to some extent through a mist of fury because I loved the country we had than and the way our men fought for it.

He mocks our pseudo religion “We won the War”. Yes Mr H we bloody well did win it. We never started it. We were peaceful and desperately hoping another war would not come. You and the other re-writers of history can only read about the war and choose to always to see it from the point of view of the enemy. You cannot even begin to understand the views of those who had to be involved because they are no longer here. You just keep picking on the tiny minority who protested at the time and there are hardly any left to answer you back. Of course this country's leaders made mistakes in winning that horrible war. My point has always been why keep picking on them when the real horrors were perpetrated by the enemy? He says it is all right to kill enemy soldiers in battle as if it were easy to do that without collateral casualties and damage. So it would appear from that statement that we should only have bombed front line German troops. We should have left their war machine untouched until their troops were repelled to the cities. He sadly accepts the “inevitability of unintended civilian casualties in modern war”. However when that does happen he accuses the war leaders of deliberately targeting civilians. I find that accusation shocking.

I am not going to answer him point for point as he would dearly like. This way the main issue gets avoided. Will I apologise for the use of various strong adjectives in my posting to him? No I will not because as he well knows this is avoiding the issue again plus it is being over pedantic. At no time did the wartime government set out to target civilians in their homes. He has no evidence to support such a claim. He knows full well that when targeting cities because they contained factories and businesses connect directly to the war that civilians would be killed – just as they were in London, Coventry, Liverpool and in the Baedeker raids etc. Yes I believe we retaliated in the only way open to us and in hindsight it is so easy to say we over retaliated.

But had he been here in 1940 to 1945 Mr Hitchens would have seen people cheering our bombers on their way to Germany night after night. I saw it from my birth town in East Anglia. In 1940 we were at the mercy of the Third Reich waiting for the coming invasion, then came the Battle of Britain and the blitz. All we had was the remnants of our defeated army and the beginnings of our bomber force. We out produced the Germans in heavy bombers which we had developed solely (I have to keep saying this) because it was all we had to hit back with until as we hoped the Americans would join us in defeating the Nazis. This is the justification Mr Hitchens asked me for. He keeps going on about moral codes. Tell that to the survivors of the Holocaust. Tell that to the relatives of those bombed in their sleep like my neighbours. I watched as the ambulances took away the bodies and was too young to fully understand at the time.

I watched a film on TV some years ago when a German woman survivor in I believe Cologne said she understood why they were bombed simply because they did it to us first. She even admitted her original worship of Hitler. I do not have any idea how many shared her view but how honest of her. He keeps coming up with alternative targets for our bombers. This is typical of history re-writers, they are forever saying “why didn't we do this or that?” We did what seemed right at the time. If we had had months to think out all our tactics in trying to win this dreadful conflict we would undoubtedly have done many things differently. He then implies I might be suggesting he doesn't condemn the appalling massacres I mentioned. He knows full well I did not say or imply that. If I thought that I would not entertain a discussion with him. His inference that I might be doing so is insulting to me and I would expect an apology from him about that.

My reason as he well knows for mentioning all those horrors was to emphasise my point about his continually picking on what he sees as the horrors committed by the British. I wonder also why Mr Hitchens is “troubled” “by these things” as he grows closer to his grave. By “these things” he appears to talking of all things to do with the war including the use of the atomic bombs. I am not troubled by anything from the past but I am certainly troubled by the prospects for the future. I am annoyed and upset by people like Mr Hitchens when because of their world experiences, their education, their reading etc. they feel equipped to re-write history. When I said “they” tried to kill me and my family by “they”, I meant (oh God do I really have to spell this out?) the Luftwaffe, the German military machine, the German government, all those who supported the German war effort, all those who voted Hitler and the Nazis and their supporters into power. Why does he keep on about the suffocated and burned to death of Hamburg and Dresden? The German aircrew can come and kill us in our homes but – he implies - that does not give us the justification to bomb a distant German city? We should just sit in our bombed out homes and say we must behave in a civil and Christian way about this. We must not let our airmen retaliate even though it is our only means of doing so.

As tired as I get of saying this I will never the less continue to do so. Mr Hitchens was not here sitting in the rubble of his home having lost his family. I am talking all the time about how we felt here at home being bombed in the war. This is the point lost to Mr Hitchens. In the war. Not seventy years after the war but in the war. I find it hard to get into the mind of someone obsessed with the horrors of bombing in a country which started by bombing us. The obsession goes on when he talks of the baked corpses of their children in suitcases. Where did he get that from? No doubt he read it somewhere. It's all what we the British did to the poor Germans. I know I am wasting my breath here – that's obvious but his continual digging out of these what I find sick clichés nauseates me. Yes so does war in all its forms.

Had the Germans remained neutral after WW1 and Europe remained a united force for good of course there would have been no burnt corpses or suffocated families in their cellars but they didn't – did they? They started a war and committed some of the worst crimes against humanity in all of history. However – for the umpteenth time – we were the innocents – Hitler and the Nazis were the criminals and all Mr H can do is call us criminals because we retaliated in kind. He says he has re written nothing! Yes he has. Anyone who claims we fought a bad war is to my mind re writing it. He is perpetually looking at the war from the point of view of a survivor of British bombing who is carrying the dead burnt corpse of their child in a suitcase. He never does it from the standpoint of an English survivor of German bombing. I thank God that I and my family survived (just) and that I had not been born a German living in a bombed German city. It was war – Germany started the bombing and I survived. I am tired of him keeping on telling me how they suffered – we suffered because of them.

I am not surprised he has suffered a great deal of anger from our veterans but as he so often says he is a hate figure and he sure revels in it. Yes he has attacked the veterans for when he attacks their leaders – Harris for example who most aircrew admired – he attacks them – that is why he had abuse from them. Why should he go to America? Because they don't tolerate criticism of their military in all wars as easily as we do. However I am sure he can produce some evidence to the contrary. One more point - perhaps the best way of summing up my argument. If the killing of civilians – deliberate as with the atomic bombs – or non deliberate – yes non deliberate as in the bombing of Germany results in the shortening of the war with the consequent saving of many more civilian lives it has to be justified. Ending any war as speedily as possible has to be morally right. WW2 was not just a war between Germany and the countries it attacked and invaded. It was a fight by the Allies to put an end to the atrocities being committed by the Germans on a massive scale. Therefore the means we adopted in defence and attack had to justify the end. That is how I see it and it is the reason I find Mr Hitchen's views on the conduct of our war leaders reprehensible.

Below is an extract from The US Strategic Bombing Survey of 1945 which I feel offers some support for my views regarding the success of the bombing campaign. THE UNITED STATES STRATEGIC BOMBING SURVEY September 1945 (Extract) The Survey has made extensive studies of the reaction of the German people to the air attack and especially to city raids. These studies were carefully designed to cover a complete cross section of the German people in western and southern Germany and to reflect with a minimum of bias their attitude and behavior during the raids. These studies show that the morale of the German people deteriorated under aerial attack. The night raids were feared far more than daylight raids. The people lost faith in the prospect of victory, in their leaders and in the promises and propaganda to which they were subjected. Most of all, they wanted the war to end. They resorted increasingly to "black radio'' listening, to circulation of rumor and fact in opposition to the Regime; and there was some increase in active political dissidence -- in 1944 one German in every thousand was arrested for a political offense. If they had been at liberty to vote themselves out of the war, they would have done so well before the final surrender. In a determined police state, however, there is a wide difference between dissatisfaction and expressed opposition. Although examination of official records and those of individual plants shows that absenteeism increased and productivity diminished somewhat in the late stages of the war, by and large workers continued to work.

However dissatisfied they were with the war, the German people lacked either the will or the means to make their dissatisfaction evident. The city area raids have left their mark on the German people as well as on their cities. Far more than any other military action that preceded the actual occupation of Germany itself, these attacks left the German people with a solid lesson in the disadvantages of war. It was a terrible lesson; conceivably that lesson, both in Germany and abroad, could be the most lasting single effect of the air war.

Below are my comments regarding Bishop Bell. I have been looking at the profile of Bishop Bell. To start with he was very pro German. He had a great affinity to the German church, had close friends within the German church and greatly admired German architecture especially the churches. He was chairman for the International Christian Committee for German Refugees. He singled out German Jews for prayer and helped German church families to come to Britain before the war. During the war Bishop Bell helped German prisoners of war and our own conscientious objectors. I think that little lot proves one thing – Bishop Bell was definitely very fond of Germany and the German people. I am not for one moment implying he was pro Nazi for the complete opposite is clearly the case. But it does explain why he spoke as he did in the H of L about our bombing of Germany. Fortunately for this country and perhaps the wider world he was not listened to. Even the then Archbishop of York replied "it is a lesser evil to bomb the war-loving Germans than to sacrifice the lives of our fellow countrymen..., or to delay the delivery of many now held in slavery".

He wanted the resumption of “friendly relations” with Germany and he opposed measures aimed to destroy the morale of Germany. What I wonder would his view have been if a close family member had been in say Auschwitz. Would his concern of German morale remained the same? Bell asked Anthony Eden to publicly explain that the British had no wish to enslave Germany – only to remove the Nazis. What a ridiculous statement - of course we had no intention to “enslave” Germany. We just wanted to save our country from enslavement. For Bell to have even thought he could influence the German population to get rid of Hitler by any means including assassination was so naive it beggars belief.

Even if Hitler had been killed in some plot or other it is a certainty other top Nazi leaders would have taken over and been even more ruthless than before. A look at the reprisals after Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in Prague in 1942 and after the abortive attempt on Hitler's life in 1945 for example show clearly how the Nazis increased their reign of terror and determination to fight on with even greater vigour. It must be mentioned here that Roosevelt's insistence on Germany's unconditional surrender at Casablanca in 1943 created a situation where Germany would now fight to the bitter end. This undoubtedly lengthened the war and caused hundreds of thousands more deaths on all fronts and on all sides. Maybe Bishop Bell criticised Roosevelt's decision but if so I have yet to hear about it. A German surrender with acceptable conditions would have obviated the need for intensive bombing and also discussion like this need not have taken place. Bishop Bell was an undoubtedly good man who in my opinion was fortunately not listened to by the government of the day.

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30 March 2013 5:35 PM

For some time I have ignored the intemperate, aggressive posts of Mr Jacubs, in which he repeatedly misrepresents my position on the bombing of German civilians. I am grateful to those other contributors who have defended me against his assaults. But I now feel the moment has come to respond. As I have said, some contributors here are no more than background noise. I have tried to engage with them and found it a waste of time. In the interests of trying to maintain standards of civility, generosity to opponents, logic and behaviour, I now turn to Mr Jacubs. Let us see whether he can defend himself, whether he can learn from argument, or whether he, too, can be dismissed hereafter as background noise. It’s up to him.

I shall deal, piece by piece, with his latest contribution:

Mr Jacubs writes :”Here we go again. Mr Hitchens and his absolute loathing for all things to do with Britain’s contribution in winning both world wars.”

I reply: What is this ‘absolute loathing’ of which he speaks? ‘Absolute’ is a pretty powerful word, and it means what it says. Absolute. I have expressed, on many occasions, my admiration for the individual courage and sacrifice of soldiers, sailors and airmen during both these wars, a body of men and women which includes my own father and grandfather, and my mother. I here do so again. Thus, there is no ‘loathing’ and it is not ‘absolute’. I might add that I am unequivocally glad that, having entered these wars, we were not on the losing side in either of them. Will Mr Jacubs therefore withdraw these words (I know he cannot possibly justify them)?

If he will not, can he tell me why he repeatedly makes this baseless suggestion?

Mr Jacubs continues “Just let us assume the worst of Bomber Command and Churchill and Harris.”

I reply: Who assumes this or is asked to assume it? Bomber Command can be taken to include all those who served in it. Once again, I stress my admiration for the men who flew, and my sorrow at their loss, and my refusal to blame them for the decisions of their superiors.

Here are the words I used on 30th June 2012, in my Mail on Sunday column reproduced here:

‘Now that we have a memorial at last to the thousands of men who flew and died in Bomber Command, can we please cart away the ugly statue of that unpleasant man Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, GCB, OBE, AFC?

I am lost in admiration for those crews. I do not know how, night after night, they left all that was dear to them, climbed into a cramped and freezing death-trap and set off into the dark. Nearly half of them would die horribly, and they knew it.

The death rate was an appalling 44 per cent – 55,573 of the very best, brightest and bravest young men in Britain, the Commonwealth and the Allied countries gone for ever, and our ill-led, sloppy and declining country has felt their loss every day since. Heaven knows it is time their sacrifice, and the equal bravery of those who survived, was marked. A medal would be nice, too.’

So I ‘assume the worst’ of people whose courage I praise, for whom I say I am ‘lost in admiration’ and for whom I urge the award of a medal? (see also ‘absolute loathing’ above).

Even in the case of Sir Arthur Harris, I am not ‘absolute’ but commend his (undoubted) bravery when he was a fighting flyer, and his honesty. (‘Absolute loathing’ would surely not permit such feelings).

My views on Churchill (many times stated, here repeated) are that he was quite right to continue the war in June 1940 and deserves his place in history for doing so. This is a completely separate question from whether we should have entered the war when we did. A surrender at that stage in 1940(after the defeat of France, and Dunkirk) would have been very wrong and disastrusly dangerous. Once you have started a war, you have to keep fighting until you win.

On this particular subject, the ‘Area Bombing’ policy I think most dispassionate observers would accept that Churchill was less than straightforward about it, and Harris himself felt let down by his Premier, who originally supported the policy but later rather sidled away from it. But as it was not his central or supreme achievement ( as it *was* Harris’s central and supreme achievement) it would be wrong to judge Churchill solely on this episode, so I do not. It certainly detracts from the absurd worship which has been accorded to him, but so do lots of things. He was not perfect.

I think the evidence is growing that Mr Jacubs does not actually read what I write, or hear what I say - but misreads and mishears it through a mist of fury. This, as in so much misunderstanding, is caused by his own grave doubts (which any decent person must have) about the deliberate bombing of civilians in their homes. He needs to suppress these doubts so that he can continue to adhere to our great national pseudo-religion ‘We Won the War’ and its central belief in the ‘Finest Hour’ an in the unalloyed goodness of 'our sde' which inconveniently included the mass murderer Stalin. And it is very common for those who suffer from doubts, and fight agaisnt them, to become very angry when others express those same doubts. I understand this. I even sympathise with it. But I cannot allow him, on this basis, to misrepresent me here unchallenged.

Mr Jacubs continues: ‘ Let us believe they [by which I assume he means Bomber Command, Harris and Churchill] were the murdering monsters he says they were.’

I reply: Where have I used the expression ‘murdering monsters’ or anything like it? If Mr Jacubs is going to say that I *said* this, he needs to substantiate the attribution, or withdraw it.

Mr Jacubs continues: ‘When one thinks of atrocities committed by most other countries why does he keep picking on the one devastating campaign by the Allies which I don't doubt considerably shortened the war?’

I reply: ‘Does he really not grasp that it is precisely because this wrong deed was done by my own country’s government and armed forces that I have a duty to acknowledge and criticise it, if I think it to be wrong *on principle*, as I do? It is on the basis of that same principle that I condemn all such things. What would he think of a modern-day German (or Russian) who refused to condemn the long list of misdeeds he produces below? Do these wickednesses in any way cancel out the wrongness (if it was wrong, and I believe it was, and I haven’t seen him explain why it wasn’t) of our deliberate killing of German civilians? How does this happen? What is the moral system which enables them to do so? If they don’t, and if each deed stands on its own, then the wrongness of the others has no effect on the wrongness of our bombing. In general, in working out what my position is, he may assume that I am against the deliberate killing of civilians in war on principle, whoever does it? If he is not on principle against this (and he appears not to be) then what is his objection to these deeds when done by others? On what consistent moral code (there is no other sort) is it based?

As for his saying he doesn’t doubt that the Harris campaign significantly shortened the war he may not doubt it, but plenty of other people (many of them military historians) do. His assertion is of no value without justification. What is his evidence for this effect? By how long does he think it shortened the war, and why? He must, in considering this question, ask what the effect on the length of the war would have been if (for instance) Bomber Command resources had been switched to the Battle of the Atlantic, or switched earlier than 1944 to the targeting of military and industrial targets rather than to killing civilians? Or if proper efforts had been made to develop long-range fighter escorts allowing effective daylight bombing, as was eventually done?

He asks :’What about the more than twenty million Soviet civilians massacred by Germans during operation Barbarossa? The Russian massacre of over 20,000 Poles at Katyn Forest? The massacre of thousands of German civilians by the Poles in 1939? The German massacre of over 200,000 Poles in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The German massacre of more than 200,000 Czechs during the occupation. The more than 30,000 German civilians massacred by the Czechs in reprisals. The German massacre of French civilians at Tulle and Oradour village France 1944. The German massacre of Serbs to please their Nazi Croat friends. I nearly forgot the unimportant massacre of 67,000 Brits by the Luftwaffe. Last but God forbid surely not least the brutal murder of six million Jews and Gypsies in the Holocaust. As well he knows I could go on for ever quoting German atrocities in WW2. Where does one stop?’

I reply : I have partly answered this above. Is he suggesting in some way that I do not condemn these dreadful killings? He had better not be suggesting that. (Though I am, as it happens, unaware of the massacre of Germans by Poles in 1939 which he includes in his list, or of the massacre of 30,000 Germans by Czechs, unless he is referring to the Potsdam expulsions. Perhaps he could provide a reference).

Mr Jacubs continues: ‘As far as I know he's not yet lambasted the US for their B29 bombing of Tokio which killed four times as many as died in Dresden. He does of course love to mention everyone's pet war subject namely the atom bombing of Japan's two cities which together killed less civilians than the all the B29 raids.’

I reply : What is the significance of the numbers here? I am unequivocally against all deliberate killing of civilians. The Tokyo bombing just hasn't happened to have come up. I don’t ’love to mention’ any of these things. As I grow ever closer to my own grave, and what lies beyond it, I am increasingly troubled by all these things, some of which I blithely accepted when I was younger. I responded to a question on my attitude ( as I respond to his implied question above). In fact I write about this matter as a reluctant duty, knowing full well that I shall receive letters and attacks of the kind he produces, often in very wounding terms, and knowing that, if I attempt to discuss the matter with the authors of these epistles, I will seldom encounter reason or generosity in return. I don't have to do this. I do it because it is the truth.

Mr Jacubs continues: ‘Twenty two million German military plus millions more in war industry and the civil service equalled about half the German population and he criticises us for doing our best to annihilate them? They tried to kill me and my family and nearly succeeded when they destroyed 3 neighbouring houses killing all the occupants.’

I reply : This passage is quite incoherent. What I clearly criticise ( and what George Bell clearly criticised) is the deliberate policy of targeting German civilians in their homes. I do not attack the deliberate killing of enemy soldiers in battle. It is vital to war. I sadly accept the inevitability of unintended civilian casualties in modern war. I accept the legitimacy of attacking German command centres and ministries.

I would criticise anyone for trying to ‘do their best to annihilate’ the population of any nation. The annihilation of peoples is plainly in and of itself wrong. I think there is a word for it. Does Mr Jacubs really know what he is saying, or has the emotional mist of his intolerant, doubt-filled fury become too dense?

He says ‘they’ tried to kill me and my family’. Who is this *they*? A woman and her children in Hamburg or Dresden, baked, suffocated or burned to death? Did they try to kill Mr Jacubs and his family? Hardly. The people who tried to do this thing were Hitler and Goering, and the airmen they ordered to do it. We can argue about the responsibility of the airmen, but even they would not have disputed the fairness in war of our trying to kill them and shoot them down when they acme to bomb us. But how in any way does that justify the killing of civilians in their homes in a distant German city?

Mr Jacubs is (in my view rightly) appalled by the method of war which was used against him and his neighbours. He says :’ They tried to kill me and my family and nearly succeeded when they destroyed 3 neighbouring houses killing all the occupants.’

I agree with him that this was a horrible thing. That is exactly why I think it was wrong for us to do the same. (And not just the same. We did far more. There was no equivalent of the bombing of Hamburg and Dresden in England, thank Heaven) . I cannot see how he can simultaneously become emotional about the horror of this attack, and not see that if it is wrong for others to do it to us, it is wrong for us to do it to others.

Mr Jacubs asks: ‘ Also at war's end who did the survivors rush to be with? The Soviets or the British and Americans? ‘

Well, what of it? What does it prove? The Soviets were our allies, without whom we could not have defeated Hitler, and whom we consciously permitted to undertake the main invasion of Germany and the consequent occupation of its lands, and of the rest of Eastern Europe., in some cases handing to Red Army control areas which the Americans had in fact captured.

The fact that refugees preferred to rush into the arms of us rather than of our allies says little about our cause. The refugees from our bombing simply rushed away from it (sometimes carrying the baked corpses of their children with them in suitcases, as they had gone mad during the bombing we had inflicted on them). The German refugees from the Red Army, likewise, were fleeing, from something, not to something. Civilians caught in war would all rathr be able to stay in their homes, if only they could. It is hardy a great testimonial that they flee in misery and woe in one direction or another. Some of those refugees, including the Cossacks, we handed to the Soviets, knowing they would murder or enslave them.

And he concludes with a series of charges: Mr Jacubs: ‘He and all the other bloody re-writers of history make me sick to my stomach.’

Me: I have ‘re-written’ nothing’ . I have reproduced reputable historical accounts of events, in support of my arguments about contemporary events, principally the opening of the Bomber Command memorial.

Mr Jacubs :’He waits until years after the war when nearly all surviving combatants are dead then sets about denigrating those that gave him the gift of life and the freedom to be a journalist.’

Me: The suggestion here is that I have secretly harboured this view and waited till men are dead before daring to say it. This is not true. I have written openly of my view on this, since I formed it. I have, as a result, been subject to a great deal of anger and abuse by survivors of the war.

Mr Jacubs finishes with this suggestion :’ He should go back to the States and pull their veterans to pieces. He will have a harder ride there.’

Me: Once again he returns to his falsehood that I have criticised ‘veterans’. It is the politicians and commanders that I have attacked, and quite specifically and explicitly not the veterans. I think he knows this, but is too consumed with anger to recognise it. But he has absolutely no excuse for repeating it in future. By the way, I don’t quite know why he urges me to go ‘back’ to the USA. Does he think I am an American?